“Don’t be intimidated. Great knowledge comes from the humblest of origins.”
If you liked 2014’s The Imitation Game, a historical biopic about the life of mathematician Alan Turing, I’m sure you’ll like The Man Who Knew Infinity. Seemingly cut from the same cloth as The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything, this true story of a friendship that forever changed mathematics brims with noble intentions and inspiring scenes. Unlike Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing though, the protagonist in this movie is a lesser known self-taught mathematical genius by the name of Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose short stint at Cambridge led to the discovery of a more than few mathematical formulas, some of which are still used today to analyse black holes, a fun fact (out of many) that was revealed at the end of the movie.
In 1913, 25 year old Ramanujan (played by Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire fame) falls out of college due to his near-obsessive solitary study of mathematics. Despite countless rejection and derision from his peers in Madras, Ramanujan is determined to pursue his passion, and writes a letter to GH Hardy (Jeremy Irons), an eminent mathematician and theorist at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Hardy recognises the brilliance and originality of Ramanujan’s raw talent, and undertakes bringing Ramanujan to Cambridge to explore his theories in depth. And with that, a wide-eyed Ramanujan, leaving behind the familiarity of his culture and the love of his wife Janaki (Devika Bhise), travels 6,000 miles across the seas (air travel was still not a commodity then) to England. Together with Hardy who turns out to be a more eccentric professor than expected, Ramanujan fights tirelessly against prejudice to reveal his mathematical genius to the world.
Leading man Dev Patel’s emotions and expressions were all so intense yet nuanced, and I particularly loved the scene when Ramanujan got all riled up with Hardy over the subject of intuition and God, as well as the one when his overzealousness got the better of him and he ended up being berated worthlessly by a teacher. In that latter scene, he was trying so hard to hold back his tears, lips quivering and all.
The glorious grounds of Cambridge, the beautiful Indian costumes, and the sanguine score combining Eastern and Western musical appreciations were the icing on the cake for this film.
If there was one let-down, and I’m really nit-picking for this one, it’s how the film fails to enlighten the audience about what exactly were Ramanujan’s contributions to the field of mathematics. The scenes where Ramanujan and Hardy engage in discussions about their theories felt brief and cursory, perhaps to pander to the increasingly shorter attention span of movie-goers. But truth be told, I would have enjoyed a little more detail about the work they did. I truly believe that the film would have been so much more endearing if we had left the cinema with an awareness of what Ramanujan’s great accomplishments actually are.
The Man Who Knew Infinity opens in cinemas islandwide on 19 May 2016.
