Early in The Man Who Knew Infinity, a Cambridge professor writes a math equation on the board, then calls upon the non-note taking student Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel) to finish it. Not only does Ramanujan finish it, he also completes extra portions that weren’t on the board. The professor asks how he knew how to do it. “I just do,” Ramanujan replies.
Ramanujan is from India, and comes from poverty. He has a gift that most of the Cambridge mathematics fellows don’t know what to deal with, so a combination of jealousy and prejudice ensue. Jeremy Irons helps as Ramanujan’s mentor/advisor G.H. Hardy, and adds an interesting twist: With Ramanujan clearly a genius prodigy with little formal training, it seems like a foregone conclusion that his work should be published. Hardy then finds Ramanujan comes to his conclusions via instinct (just like Mozart could compose a symphony in his head, Hardy says). In reality, Ramanujan doesn’t understand how or why the answer is correct. Therefore Hardy requires Ramanujan to complete “proofs” to show how he gets his results, which naturally Ramanujan finds to be a waste of time.
The story covers 1914-20, so World War I occurs in the background, but it never has much of an effect on Ramanujan, except for inconveniencing him as the Cambridge campus turns into a hospital. Similar to the war’s role in the story, writer/director Matt Brown’s film doesn’t quite know how to handle Ramanujan. He’s not really rebellious, but knows he’s smarter than everyone else. He’s religious and devoted to his family in India, but never sends for them to join him. In many ways he’s a lost soul in search of a solution to his life, an odd irony given how instinctively he comes to solutions to math problems. We like him, but the fact remains that he’s a boring math geek and not interesting enough to be the subject of a movie.
It’s also true that The Man Who Knew Infinity is too much about partitions and prime numbers and doesn’t get us invested enough in the people. In The Imitation Game, for example, Alan Turing was a social misfit in addition to creating the world’s first computer.
Ramanujan misses home, and well into the film battles health issues. That’s all the edge we get; it’s not enough.
The Man Who Knew Infinity tells the story of a man who deserves to be remembered by history, but not by a 108-minute movie. Instead, read Ramanujan’s Wikipedia page – that’ll only take 10 minutes.
THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY (2) Directed by Matt Brown • Starring Dev Patel, Jeremy Irons, Malcolm Sinclair • Rated PG-13 • 108 min. • At Osio Cinemas.