By Preston Wilder

Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel) is the man who knew infinity – maybe not literally, then again “every single positive integer is one of his friends” as someone puts it. Ramanujan’s gift for complex equations took him from poor, superstitious, sitar-drenched Madras to the spires of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1913, a time when Indian faces were almost unknown in Britain – and of course he was assailed both by racism (some called him “the genius wog”, others didn’t even bother with the ‘genius’ part) and bad English food, but his singular, Newton-level mind was accepted eventually.

Scientist biopics have become something of a cottage industry in Britain, especially when the men of science have to suffer for their science – persecuted by bigoted dullards, like Alan Turing in The Imitation Game, or laid low by a rare illness like Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. Science, you might say, is the new religion, the two things scrupulously separated by order of Richard Dawkins, probably (along with Hawking, another notable atheist) the most famous living scientist – but this is where The Man Who Knew Infinity takes a rather un-British turn, allowing that scientists can also be devout and even ‘explaining’ Ramanujan’s amazing insights with the claim that a Hindu god is speaking through him. He’s not just a mathematician; he’s “a miracle”.

The film works best as a moral/mystical debate – process vs. intuition, Man vs. God. GH Hardy (Jeremy Irons) is the Cambridge professor who becomes Ramanujan’s mentor – and Hardy is a proud atheist (though it may be more accurate to say, as his protégé puts it, that “you do believe in God, you just don’t think He likes you”), trusting only in science. “It’s the only truth I know; it’s my church,” he declares – but the film contrasts his insistence on supplying proofs for everything with Ramanujan’s trust in fully-formed truths emerging intuitively, and it also opens with Bertrand Russell’s dictum that “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty”. Maths is an artform (our hero says his equations are “like a painting”), possessed of beauty and quasi-mystical origins. “How do you know?” asks a bewildered prof when Ramanujan solves a problem out of thin air. “I don’t know,” comes the reply; “I just do”. Richard Dawkins can’t be very happy with this movie.

Maybe it’s because of the un-trendy message, but The Man Who Knew Infinity does seem rather square in the filmmaking. Bits of it are downright cheesy, like a very fake-looking zeppelin turning up out of nowhere to bomb a Cambridge high street, or a fever dream where Ramanujan imagines his own arms criss-crossed with equations. The pace seems stodgy in general. Scenes are talky, and attempts at imaginative staging (like playing one conversation over a game of indoor tennis) only make them feel talkier. At some point, once Ramanujan has been established at Trinity, the script becomes afflicted with randomness, skipping from the WW1 trenches to our hero’s wife waiting back in Madras to the unfolding drama in Cambridge – made even more dramatic when the boy wonder starts coughing and clutching his sides about halfway through, Hawking-type illness added to Turing-type persecution for maximum suffering.

Bottom line? This is not a very good film – yet it’s absorbing, if only for the story and actors. Patel is predictably intense, Irons brings his trademark mixture of dry, melancholy and aristocratic (though Hardy is apparently of humble stock, self-created like Ramanujan) to compelling effect, and of course there’s any number of stuffy professors insisting that “a dark face” will never grace the walls of their august university. The structure is classic male weepie, climaxing (no spoiler, surely) with our hero accepting belated recognition on his hospital bed – and an angrier film might’ve complicated matters, maybe with Ramanujan telling the snobby racists where they can stick their recognition, but this one simply bows to the inevitable. It even quotes Kipling un-ironically, our hero being a kind of Gunga Din: “A better man than I am,” or indeed better than any of them.

“I was told you love numbers more than people,” notes Ramanujan’s wife. The Man Who Knew Infinity has the opposite problem, loving people more than numbers: it’s a heartfelt drama, but its sympathies are un-scientific and even the science – the actual maths – doesn’t feature much, despite a brief explanation of “partitions”. I liked it more than The Imitation Game, because it doesn’t try to shoehorn the past into 21st-century orthodoxy (it’s a film that really could’ve been made at any point in the past 40 years), but it’s unlikely to follow that Alan Turing biopic to Oscar glory. It’s just too un-trendy.

DIRECTED BY Matthew Brown

STARRING Dev Patel, Jeremy Irons, Toby Jones

UK 2015 108 mins





