There are dozens of shots of Ramanujan furiously scribbling in his notebook, and precious few that convey what he’s working towards, or what success might look like for him. Ramanujan’s passion for numbers is clear - he writes equations with the fever of someone penning letters to a distant love - but that passion is never made accessible to viewers. As moviegoers have long since learned the hard way, math is difficult to visualize cinematically, and Brown falls into all of the classic traps. That Ramanujan has a beautiful mind is easy for Hardy to identify, but almost impossible for him to prove - “The Man Who Knew Infinity” faces the same problem. Ramanujan accepts the offer, sorrowfully parting from his wife and exchanging the comforts of his home for the dreary campus of Trinity College, where war is on the horizon, nationalism is running high and racism is all the rage.

Hardy is smitten, and perhaps more than a little flummoxed, by what this stranger from the subcontinent has written him, and invites the unassuming autodidact up to Cambridge. Ramanujan’s passion for numbers is clear - he writes equations with the fever of someone penning letters to a distant love, eventually gathering the courage to send his work to Hardy and his colleagues at Trinity College. READ MORE: Watch: ‘The Man Who Knew Infinity’ Gets Emotional in Heartbreaking New Clip Erratic, compulsive and completely consumed by the equations that come to him like visions from God, the self-taught savant is terrible at his job and even worse at his marriage. Hardy ( Jeremy Irons, who’s a treat to watch even on auto-pilot) is waxing nostalgic about “the most romantic figure in the recent history of mathematics.” He’s referring, of course, to Ramanujan ( Dev Patel, natch), whom we meet as a 25-year-old shipping clerk in his hometown of Madras circa 1914. A mannered and milquetoast period biopic about the short life of mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, “ The Man Who Knew Infinity” opens with a Bertrand Russell quote that conveniently frames its failings: “Mathematics, rightly viewed, posses not only truth but supreme beauty.” Writer-director Matthew Brown (“Ropewalk”) has made a handsome and well-meaning testament to a rare man, but his film is all truth and no beauty (and that truth has been strained through the filter of historical revisionism and narrative convenience).Įssentially “The Theory of Everything” meets “Good Will Hunting” with a hard colonialist twist, “The Man Who Knew Infinity” begins in 1920, where snooty British academic G.H.

The man who knew infinity movie 2016