Beautiful, but Missing The Point

Matthew Brown’s “The Man Who Knew Infinity” is a sluggish, cliché-heavy film about a Hindu Brahmin mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel), who writes equations on the stones of his Madras temple and longs for his work — he has filled two thick notebooks with equations — to be published. But he is impoverished and has no academic degree and finally finds work as a bookkeeping clerk.

Through the efforts of his boss, Ramanujan is put in contact with the great Cambridge University mathematician  G. H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons), a master in Trinity College, where Isaac Newton formulated the laws of gravity. The year is 1913, and England’s imperialism spans the globe, with its devotion to  class distinction and discrimination, its mores and unchanging customs. No place is more rigid than Cambridge.

Enter Ramanujan, laden with his notebooks and an unwillingness to prove his work by conventional methods. He knows they are correct because they come to him from God. As he tells the non-believing Hardy, “An equation has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.” And despite the terrible food (he is a vegetarian in a land of mutton), the dismissal of his work by the mostly traditional faculty, the cold weather, the college rules (never walk on the grass of the quadrangle), he works nonstop, spewing out more equations by daylight or the weak candlelight in his room.

All of this should have been the basis for a fine movie exploring the nature of genius and the beauty of pure mathematics. Instead it is a treacly mix of familiar tropes: his sad bride back home, his jealous mother who hides his letters from his wife, the noble hero who endures and endures until fate intervenes, even the intervention of World War I.

The real problem for Brown was that Ramanujan and his life were neither attractive nor appealing. He was a short, stocky man who was 22 years old when he married a 10-year old girl. So enter Patel, charming and energetic (“Slumdog Millionaire” and the Marigold Hotel movies), and Irons, who actually resembles the real Hardy. They talk and talk, words pouring from Irons like golden honey and spewing from Patel like machine gun bullets. But they never explain “partitions,” or “parallels” or “infinity theory” to us. 

The film is beautiful to look at. Like so many English directors, Brown uses outside and inside locations to substitute for content. The rituals of lecture, high table in the dining hall, fellows meetings are all given to us in mellow, burnished lighting. But it is still formulaic, disappointing.

Patel is fine, Irons superb. Good, too, are Toby Jones (Littlewood), Stephen Fry (Sir Francis Spring) and Jeremy Northam (an insouciant Bertrand Russell). But even they cannot make the movie add up to anything special.

 “The Man Who Knew Infinity” is in wide release. It is rated PG-13 for themes and smoking.