The others are not much more welcoming at first, with the friendly exception of John Edensor Littlewood (a fine Toby Jones), the mathematician with whom Hardy will later develop the famous Hardy-Littlewood conjecture regarding twin primes. Larry Smith were permitted to film at the real Trinity College.) Worse, the creative impulses that drive Ramanujan’s work seem to have no place in an academic environment characterized by stifling English rigidity at best, racially charged hostility at worst - the latter quality exemplified in particular by the cartoonishly cruel and fatuous Professor Howard (Anthony Calf). (In a coup that improves the film’s production values significantly, Brown and d.p. Seeking the appreciation and recognition that have eluded him at home, and hoping to be published immediately, Ramanujan leaves behind his teary-eyed bride and his overbearing mother (the rather aptly named Arundhati Nag) to embark on the long, dangerous ocean voyage to Britain.īut neither fame nor fortune are there to greet Ramanujan at Cambridge, where the dons order him to keep off the grass and the dining hall is sadly short on vegetarian options. While he comes to love his wife over time, their relationship is destined to be a mostly long-distance one: When Ramanujan writes a letter to Hardy (Irons) and sends along some of his notebooks, the professor immediately recognizes the untempered brilliance of the young scholar’s work, and invites him to come to Trinity College and pursue his studies further. That’s in keeping with the general attitude toward Ramanujan (Patel) when we first encounter him in 1913 Madras, India, as an impoverished 25-year-old whose obsessive, self-taught mastery of mathematics has taken precedent over all other commitments in life, including his job as a shipping clerk and his recently arranged marriage to Janaki (Devika Bhise).
Like last year’s furrowed-brow biopics “The Imitation Game” and “The Theory of Everything,” though with less surface gloss and fewer emotional hooks, 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.” 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. 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.
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.