Matt Brown’s workmanlike direction ties things up neatly but fails to elicit enough empathy for the central characters of the young number-cruncher and his tutor-cum-collaborator.Īnchored by Jeremy Irons’s riveting performance (note especially the two stirring speeches to fellow faculty members just before and after his protégé’s death), The Man Who Knew Infinity is an overly earnest portrait of a groundbreaking mathematical genius. The film’s epigraph, “Mathematics rightly viewed possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty”, derives from Ramanujan’s contemporary in the groves of academe, Bertrand Russell (Jeremy Northam, suitably stiff-upper-lip). Brief scenes of wounded soldiers are seen and heard in a hospital. A dead woman is shown following a bomb attack on the city. He is later beaten by a group of fellow students. Violence: A character is berated by a teacher. The whiny wall-to-wall background music score is a major deterrent. The Man Who Knew Infinity is rated PG-13 by the MPAA for some thematic elements and smoking. Ramanujan has to also contend with racial discrimination from members of the university’s governing body as well as misguided youngsters enlisted in the army. Scenes showing British soldiers writhing in tents are perfunctory. Read: Dev Patel on the man who knew infinityĬoncurrently, the Great War erupts in Europe. Synopsis: Growing up poor in Madras, India, Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar earns admittance to Cambridge University during WWI, where he becomes a pioneer in mathematical theories with the guidance of his professor, G.H. Original title: The Man Who Knew Infinity. There are several awkward transitions to Ramanujan’s native dwelling place where his mother (Arundathi Nag) and young bride (Devika Bhise) appear to have agreed upon a tenuous truce. The Man Who Knew Infinity is a film directed by Matt Brown with Dev Patel, Jeremy Irons, Toby Jones, Stephen Fry. Matt Brown’s workmanlike direction ties things up neatly but fails to elicit enough empathy for the central characters of the young number-cruncher and his tutor-cum-collaborator. Tragically, Ramanujan died of tuberculosis at the age of 32, barely a year after his return to India. Read: Why this film is important for mathematics
Without any formal training but with an intuitive aptitude for equations and theorems, the Indian math prodigy (Patel, fairly affecting) was encouraged by the English academic (Irons) to come up with proofs to back up his formulae. It is the Oscar-winning actor’s (Reversal of Fortune, 1990) dynamic characterisation of the celebrated Cambridge scholar GH Hardy that sets The Man Who Knew Infinity apart from other recent by-the-numbers biopics.Ī prestige production in the James Ivory-Ismail Merchant mould, the film chronicles the true story of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the Madras-born mathematician whose unparalleled flair for numbers was honed during his time at the hallowed Trinity College back in the 1910s.