Film: The Man Who Knew Infinity
Cast: Jeremy Irons, Toby Jones, Stephen Fry, Jeremy Northam, Kevin McNally, Enzo Cilenti
Director: Matthew Brown
Rating:
Dev Patel cannot dance. Slumdog Millionaire is documented proof to that end. After watching The Man Who Knew Infinity - a simple yet concrete Biopic of math genius Srinivasa Ramanujan - you know beyond a doubt that Dev Patel can act. Really, really well. And that's saying something, when it's a movie that has Jeremy Irons and Tony Jones being brilliant as ever.
Based on the book by Robert Kanigel about India's most Googled mathematician, this film is head and shoulders above Ramanujan - the Abhinay Vaddi starrer that bored us inexorably, when it hit screens last year. While it would be a stretch (and then some) to describe The Man Who Knew infinity as gripping, the simple truth is that it ebbs and flows. Quietly but steadily. And aided by strong performances and some tight editing, it's a movie that won't bore you much through its 104 minute runtime.
The film tracks Ramanujan's journey from a struggling, degree-less clerk with pages and pages of math equations he has derived - scoffed at by blue-collar accountants working for the British Raj - to a prodigy who is voted as a Fellow of the Royal Society at Trinity College, Cambridge. What's really impressive is that, despite being a movie that has mathematics at its core, Mathew Brown has kept it simple - putting the spotlight on his struggle, his need to express (and subsequently suppress) his genius and the yearning of a young man who misses his wife, with just a smattering of mathematic showmanship.
Ironically, there's not too much of a makeover (with his range of emotions) that Dev Patel's undergone since Slumdog Millionaire happened eight-something years ago. But from the moment he appears in Madras struggling Ramanujan, sleeping in a run down building, begging accountants for a job while in rags and writing those mind-boggling theorems that just "come to him" on the roughly hewn stone tiles of a temple, Patel is simply brilliant. He slips into the role of a simple brahmin lad, who lived a century ago, with such ease, that he draws you into his world. Ramanujan's. Not Patel's. That wouldn't be very nice given how there might be a few DVDs of The Last Airbender lying around.
Another selling point is Jeremy Irons' broody portrayal of Math Professor G H Hardy, the man who finally invited Ramanujan to sail to England and stood by him despite opposition and scorn from practically everybody else. His trysts with Ramanujan as they differ on religion, culture, mathematic proof and mutton curry are what make the film imminently enjoyable. Needless to say, his wit and delightfully sarcastic brand of humour provide those laughs that you so dearly need to liven up a Biopic. Especially one on maths.
If there's one thing that's lacking in the film, it's that it can be called simplistic - glazing over too many details of the physical and mental struggle of a genius who wowed the world, at a time when Victorian civilisation was still revelling in its fallacies. But hey, if that kind of chop-and-stitch editing works for the Harry Potter films, it sure can work for Ramanujan.