There’s something utterly infuriating about a perfectly likable film that satisfies the senses but suffers—willingly or otherwise—from stylistic inertia. They’re enjoyable enough in the moment and forgotten as soon as the lights come up, the only lingering impression being that of an unadventurous studio ensuring a return on investment. Carefully packaged, deliberately inoffensive and benignly competent films are the bread and butter of today’s movie industry, so much so that the model has begun to trickle down to the “independent” realm, where certain titles are groomed as awards show underdogs. They’re small movies that build off “buzz”—itself a buzz word for a certain set of long-play marketing strategies—before becoming big enough hits, their reputation as “prestige pictures” wholly contradictory to their middling quality. It’s here that you’ll find the IFC release The Man Who Knew Infinity, a typically sufficient biopic about an innovative mathematician whose handsome imagery and serious subject matter essentially guilt one into thinking more of it than it actually deserves.
Written and directed by Matt Brown, whose previous directing credit is his 2000 debut Ropewalk, the film concerns the famed Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel), an Indian math genius who grew up dirt-poor with his Brahmin family in Madras before attending Cambridge University in 1914, where he overwhelmed his classmates and professors with revolutionary mathematical equations. During his brief life—he died at the age of 32 from a parasitic infection common in the Madras region—he independently compiled thousands of original and unconventional formulas that essentially changed the way people look at numbers. In other words, he was groundbreaking, and if the film based on his life shared even a fraction of his vision and imagination, we’d have something much more than this overly polite and dutiful drama.
Rather than explore the effects and sensations of Ramanujan’s intellect, Brown fusses over the details of English prewar academia—though to his credit, he seems to get the details right. There’s a lot of tweed and a lot of snobbery based on race and class; it takes an endorsement from the highly respected mathematician G.H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons) before anyone at Cambridge takes Ramanujan seriously, and even then he deals with oppression and discrimination daily. But by falling back on a routine narrative, Brown completely forgoes any sort of spiritual or artistic investigation. And it’s not as if he didn’t have the chance: Ramanujan’s Brahmin heritage gave him a deep sense of the divine, though his fierce intellect led him to find it in earthly functions; he once said “an equation has no meaning for me, unless it represents a thought of God.” As for Hardy, his 1940 essay on the aesthetics of mathematics, called A Mathematician’s Apology, illustrates the abstract and sublime qualities of certain mathematical discoveries and offers insights into the imaginative mind of a mathematician—all of which, by the way, are aimed at the layman, suggesting a filmic palatability.
Irons and Patel eagerly take to their characters, however limited and sketch-like they are in comparison to their real-life counterparts. Irons is his usual gruff but lovable self, bringing the requisite bark but none of the bite to a role that ultimately amounts to the wizened mentor stereotype; Patel, per usual, is lively and kind of annoying, overacting but never boring. There are a couple of scenes where Ramanujan and Hardy butt heads, and Brown wisely puts their diametric ideologies on display. Hardy tells his young student that his intuition isn’t enough, and that his theories, however viable, require accountability; Ramanujan responds by keeping his faith intact. When Hardy claims to be an atheist, Ramanujan tells him “No, you believe in God. You just don’t think he likes you.”
Their rapport can be absorbing, but it isn’t enough to break through the film’s rigid formula. Despite its otherworldly title, The Man Who Knew Infinity is grounded in convention. There’s no sense of anything existing beyond the screen, and the inner-workings of the brilliant mind at the center is relegated to simple window dressing. As viewers, we’re naturally drawn to exceptional people, but the great irony here—as it is with a seemingly endless parade of lame biopics about fascinating and radical figures—is that the filmmakers have done nothing but make this extraordinary person seem extraordinarily average.