Movie Review: The Man Who Knew Infinity

Movie Review: ‘The Man Who Knew Infinity’

Rating: 3/5

Director: Matthew Brown

Cast: Dev Patel, Jeremy Irons, Malcolm Sinclair, Raghuvir Joshi, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Devika Bhise

Written and directed by Matthew Brown, The Man Who Knew Infinity is the true story of friendship that forever changed mathematics.

In 1913, Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-taught Indian mathematics genius, traveled to Trinity College, Cambridge, where over the course of five years, forged a bond with his mentor, the brilliant and eccentric professor G.H. Hardy, and fought against prejudice to reveal his mathematics genius to the world.  This is Ramanujan’s story as seen through Hardy’s eyes.

This biopic of Indian maths genius Srinivasa Ramanujan does not go to infinity – or beyond. It features some exceedingly good British actors, but the script gives us a version of his life that feels like it’s from the Marks and Spencer advert. Which is a shame, because it’s an extraordinary story.

We meet Ramanujan (Dev Patel) in 1914, working as a bookkeeper in Tamil Nadu (his brain is quicker than the abacus). Self-taught, he writes to a professor Hardy (Jeremy Irons) at Trinity College, Cambridge, who recognises his talent and invites him to the UK where he’s met with horrible, ugly racism everywhere – sneery old dons deliberately mispronouncing his name and brainless thugs beating him up. This is polite and earnest, but never quite adds up to much.

Ramanujan’s story is A Beautiful Mind meets Something the Lord Made and is just as heart-wrenching and important.  Matthew Brown does a fine job of cutting through the math chat to give you the living, breathing men who collaborated and clashed a century ago.  Emotionally it is blunt, baddies are very bad, but it is a worthy story told solidly, and with good performances.

Despite the universal numeracy requirement that students may plod through from pre-school to kindergarten, it’s safe to assume that most people have no idea what pure math is all about.  This is true as well for the people in India that form one subject of writer-director Matthew Brown in “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” based on Robert Kanigel’s book, The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan.  One answer proposed by the story is that pure mathematics is like a painting without the color, which makes the subject perhaps as abstract as fine music.  Brown’s biopic of Srinivas Ramanujan, who died at the age of 32 of tuberculosis after leaving behind several notebooks of proofs that some thought impossible, shows the man as a poor Brahmin from Madras living with his mother (Arundhati Nag) and wife Janaki (Devika Bhise). Ramanujan is so absorbed in math that he seems to care nothing about his poverty-stricken surroundings but shows great love for his wife.

Audiences hoping to learn more about Ramanujan’s contributions to number theory, continued fractions and other branches of mathematics might do well to consult other dramatic treatments of his life, including last year’s little-seen independent drama “Ramanujan,” various stage adaptations and Robert Kanigel’s 1991 biography, from which Brown adapted the script. Still, it’s rarely a good sign when a picture ends with a celebratory salute to its subject’s accomplishments while leaving viewers with a merely rudimentary grasp of what those accomplishments were. And such is the case with “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” which, for all its weighty-sounding talk of proofs and theorems, effectively pitches its story at an audience whose interest in higher-level math is presumably rather less than infinite. Brown’s movie makes the case for its protagonist as a figure of extraordinary intellect —“extraordinary,” of course, being convenient shorthand for “too boringly cerebral for a lowest-common-denominator audience.  

The major theme of the film is the friendship of Ramanujan with the curmudgeon Hardy, who simply cannot understand where his protégé gets his information.  Hardy has his traditional pals in Prof. Littlewood (Toby Jones), who is Sancho Panza to Hardy’s Don Quixote, and is jokingly referred to as a figment in Hardy’s imagination.  This friendship is wholly credible as Ramanujan is fluent with the language of his adopted country albeit not with the King’s English spoken by pipe-smoking Hardy.

The arguments between Ramanujan and Hardy form easily the most absorbing aspect of “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” as their eloquent clash of wills is shown to be not just intellectual but ideological in nature. Hardy, an atheist, is presented as a slave to rational thought, but for Ramanujan, a human calculator with the soul of a poet, the beauty of math is inextricable from its fundamental mysteriousness; proofs can only go so far to explain the inexplicable, and he sees the face of God reflected in every equation he writes. It’s a stirring sentiment that would ring truer if Ramanujan’s work, presented here in elegantly indecipherable lines of script, served more than a purely decorative function. Brown seems wary of putting his audiences to sleep, but a measure of brainy, concrete exegesis here would not have gone awry.

Dev Patel’s incredible performance as the poverty stricken resident of Mumbai seeking to win a huge jackpot in Danny Boyle’s 2008 film “Slumdog Millionaire” makes him the obvious choice here. He unfolds a performance as a young man who may well be considered arrogant by mathematicians envious of Ramanujan’s God-given brilliance.  We find a country whose class-centered society exists still, though perhaps by now some of the professors at Trinity are women.  The dialogue rises to gentle wit particularly with the exchanges between Bertrand Russell (Jeremy Northam) and G.H. Hardy, and despite Ramanujan’s death at 32, we leave the theater feeling good.