The Man Who Knew Infinity (2016)
2/5
The Man Who Knew Infinity (2016) is a poor-boy-cum-genius flick set mainly in the politically and socially incorrect era of early 20th-century England.
It tells the true story of Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel), a mathematics genius who gets the opportunity to study at Cambridge University with G.H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons) and potentially have his work there published.
However, right from the beginning, the film’s pacing is distracting; we are dropped into the middle of Ramanujan’s life with no buildup whatsoever (it’s almost like I could hear director Matthew Brown yelling, “Here he is, he’s poor, he’s a genius—be entertained!”).
The film suffers from its inability to create and sustain tension. This is apparent when the movie is dealing with small things—like a 6000-kilometre boat journey not being in there (twice) or characters departing and coming back from the war without any build-up—and bigger things, mainly Ramanujan’s mathematic feats. For example, we see him and Hardy working on a chalkboard, and the next thing we know they’ve solved an “impossible” formula they were labouring over (I was never really clear on what they were working on, or why it mattered).
This lack of tension throughout makes the film seem much more like a trailer for the movie it might have been than the fleshed-out feature-length it pretends to be.
Even the parts of genius flicks that are almost always entertaining fall flat here. Sure, we enjoy watching Ramanujan outsmart his professors in the same way we enjoyed watching Will Hunting (Matt Damon) outsmarting his in Good Will Hunting (1997). However, the difference between these two films is that to Will, his genius was a curse, and it was entertaining and movingly frustrating to see him almost throw it away; Ramanujan’s brilliance is portrayed more in the vein of, “Gee, isn’t this great being much smarter than everyone else?” It does not make for compelling viewing, even if Patel handles the role with grace and humility.
The racism that Ramanujan encounters upon his arrival in England is predictably prevalent, but actually presents the only real hurdle for Ramanujan to leap, and the resulting friction is one of the only moving parts of the film. (However, I question the sincerity of the scenes when Ramanujan prays, alone in his cold room, 6000 kilometres away from home, and Brown can only think to play sitar music.)
However, Brown clearly did his research before directing this movie by watching every film about leaving home, forbidden love, older generations versus younger generations, racism, and young handsome geniuses (which somehow has become a trope); unfortunately, he took all the worst, overplayed parts and made a montage of them. This film involves postal-correspondence misunderstandings, needless self-sacrifice, and cold handshakes melting into warm embraces; like most things in this movie, we’ve seen it all before.