Sunday, 1 May 2016

THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY REVIEW

Is being a genius a pain or a blessing? That, a regular mind would never know. To function on a plane that none of your contemporaries are able to comprehend must sound like a thrill, but the frustration of having to explain yourself every time because the others simply cannot understand what you are up to is a pain. You know you are right, you don’t have the patience to prove yourself, in fact you don’t feel the need to prove yourself, but the structures of academia will throw you out if you can’t prove what you say. You are a racehorse, being bridled and burdened like a workhorse, to prove that you indeed are a genius as you say.  The story of Srinivasa Ramanujan is one such; a man who was so far ahead of his times, much like a Galileo, that he was almost never understood.

The Man Who knew Infinity traces the journey of Srinivasa Ramanujan from Madras (derived from
Mandarajya – literally translated to The Land of Fools, as said in the movie) to Cambridge amongst the most esteemed scholars of the world. This is not just the story of Ramanujan, it is also the story of Professor G H Hardy and perhaps also the story of Cambridge and its elite systems of education, and how one man from obscurity was able to challenge all structures, not by arrogance or statesmanship or diplomacy or charm, but just by sheer brilliance.

The movie begins when Ramanujan is already married, has already ‘invented himself’ (as said in the movie) as a mathematician who can see patterns in anything. He has no education to speak of, only an inexplicable brilliance with numbers which most people cannot see, not because they do not want to, but because it is just too far above them. It requires someone who can speak the same language, the language of numbers, to understand the humongous potential of what Ramanujan has in his notebooks. G.H. Hardy was that man. He thought he had discovered someone rare, someone special, someone too important to be left aside because the Lords at Cambridge thought that bringing an Indian student with no formal education was an unnecessary indulgence.

No time is wasted in explaining much of Ramanujan’s initial struggles for recognition in Madras. Very soon, we are at Cambridge, gazing at the apple tree under which Newton sat. Once there he discovers that what he has come for and what Hardy wants are very different. Ramanujan thinks that all his work has already been done in his notebooks, and just needs to be published, but Hardy thinks otherwise. He wants Ramanujan to conform to the strictures of academia, to produce proofs so that the ground breaking work is not rejected for want of adequate explanation. Not being bred in an academic surrounding makes this change frustrating for Ramanujan who just sees the solution without feeling it necessary to explain the way. This clash of methods, of ideologies, is the central conflict of The Man who Knew Infinity. There are other conflicts, like the one Ramanujan’s young wife fights with her mother-in-law, a silent fight of tears and grief, the conflict that Hardy has to wage with some of his peers and bosses at Cambridge trying to  defend Ramanujan, the conflict that Ramanujan has to face as an outsider in an English campus in the colonial era, the First World War and, of course, Ramanujan’s conflict with his own health.

With so many issues to portray, the writers might have been in a quandary about where to put the
weight in without leaving out anything. Their vision is very clear, they want to show the work done by Ramanujan and Hardy first, everything else next, and there lies the weight of the script. Every scene where Ramanujan and Hardy argue, sometimes softly, sometimes violently is special. You can feel the friction, but greater than that is the passion to create something spectacular. That passion is so beautifully depicted in the scene where Hardy takes Ramanujan to show the enshrined status of Newton’s Principa Mathematica, and says that he belongs there, only if he can take the path to get there. The best scene of the movie for me. That Ramanujan finally comes around and understands the importance of the rigor that Hardy so desperately wants, is as much a tribute to Hardy as it is to Ramanujan. Hardy, as said in the film, ‘discovered Ramanujan’.

The best thing about The Man who knew Infinity is the absolute unidirectional purpose of its writing, never wavering, while portraying all aspects of Ramanujan’s time in the UK. Maybe perhaps a little more about his struggles for vegetarian food would have made his challenges more obvious to the audience. The dialogues are delightful at many places, like the letter written by Littlewood, played with perfect understatement by Toby Jones, to Hardy, or Hardy’s address to the council defending his plea for an FRS in favor of Ramanujan. Pure mathematics, an art unto itself, understood only by a few, and thankfully the film does not try to force any mathematical concepts to the audience, except for a very simple explanation of partitions.

Dev Patel grows on you as Ramanujan, and looks settled in the UK portion of the movie. But one still
wonders how it would have been to have an Indian actor portray Ramanujan and how his English would have sounded in Cambridge in 1914. Dev Patel’s English looks too polished (maybe deliberately so for international audiences) for a Tamil Brahmin of 1914 with no degree. The movie though belongs to Jeremy Irons who hits the nail on the head as G H Hardy, a masterclass performance, especially when he realizes that he could be Ramanujan’s friend.

The Man who Knew Infinity is an exquisite piece of cinema, along the lines of The Imitation Game or even Pawn Sacrifice, that shows us of the peculiar ways in which genius works, their struggles to get along with normal people who just don’t understand them and the importance of a guiding had that shows them the way to pinnacle of their promise. Maybe cruelly cut short in life, but Ramanujan’s legacy lives on in the same hall that houses the legacy of Sir Isaac Newton.

Perfectly told tale of incomprehensible genius!

4/5 

No comments:

Post a Comment