“The Man Who Invented Infinity” presents a real-life genius who was truly a Mozart of mathematics: Original work seemed to spring fully-born out of him, with no apparent explanation.
Just about the time you might be thinking, “Wow, this guy is like the Mozart of math,” a character in the movie says it out loud. That’s the main weakness here. Everything’s got to be spelled out in case we might miss it.
The mathematician is Srinivasa Ramanujan, played by “Slumdog Millionaire” star Dev Patel. We begin his story in Madras, India, just before World War I, where the youthful Ramanujan tries to convince somebody of his genius.
He secures a humble job as an accountant, despite his lack of university education. Finally he sends a sheaf of radical formulas to a professor in England.
As the erudite G.H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons) sees it, either this young man is a visionary or a charlatan. It’s tantalizing enough to invite him to the hallowed halls of Cambridge to find out.
Hardy’s stuffy Cambridge colleagues express their disbelief about various aspects of the visitor’s work. But a lot of their objections are frankly about his skin color.
These barriers make for good drama, even if you can’t understand the math, as we discovered with the case of Benedict Cumberbatch in “The Imitation Game.”
Writer-director Matt Brown doesn’t try any tricks here, just a straightforward telling of a fascinating true story. Ramanujan struggles with his new home, and with his absence from his wife (Devika Bhise), who stays in India waiting patiently to be sent for.
At the risk of betraying bias, there’s not much you can do to make math exciting. People who love math swear to its elegance and beauty, but cinematic it ain’t.
There’s one scene in which Hardy pauses to explain the principle of partition; this is dramatized by him jotting down numbers on a sheet of paper. No computer-generated integers floating on the screen, or anything like that. I found that refreshing (and I understood the basic principle, too).
Patel is stalwart in the lead role, allowing Irons to steal scenes. Toby Jones and Jeremy Northam are skillful as mathematician J.E. Littlewood and future Nobel Peace Prize winner Bertrand Russell, respectively.
“Infinity” is too dutiful to really catch fire, but it’s got a strong true story plus fine actors plus a handsome British setting. You do the math.
“The Man Who Invented Infinity” (2½ stars)
An account of real-life mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel), who climbed from humble origins in India to the hallowed halls of Cambridge. The movie’s too dutiful to really catch fire, but it’s got the pleasant trappings of the British biopic, and Jeremy Irons is in fine form.
Rating: PG-13, for language
Showing: Pacific Place, Seven Gables
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