A filmy tribute to 'The Man who knew Infinity'

Monday 23 November 2015 09:34 AM IST

by G. Ragesh

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A filmy tribute to 'The Man who knew Infinity'

» Language: English

» Director: Matt Brown

» Cast: Jeremy Irons, Dev Patel, Toby Jones, Stephen Fry

At a time when crossing a sea amounts to going against one's religion, you must belong to that rare sort of humans in search of truth to brave the diktats. You need not be a rebel but you must have that passion to make the maximum out of you in your capacity as a thinking being. Sreenivasa Ramanujan, the great mathematician, whom we Indians know as a calm looking person with a sense of anxiety in his eyes as his most popular image shows, was one such man. And one need to watch Matt Brown's 2015 film "The Man who Knew Infinity" to know what he had been through in his quest to tell the truth to the world.

In a nutshell, the film is an adaptation of a book by the same title, written by Robert Kanigel, which imprints the life of Ramanujan - a largely unexplored area. Just like the book, the film offers a detailed account of his upbringing in the then Madras as a pious Brahmin youth, his achievements in mathematics and his academic collaboration with English mathematician G.H. Hardy. The film showcases the life of Hardy and the academic culture of Cambridge University during early twentieth century, precisely in the years of the First World War.

The film focuses much on the life of Ramanujan at Cambridge where he had to put up with racism, its trauma, a sense of negligence and loneliness and above all, a fever which later turned out to be fatal tuberculosis. Slum dog Millionaire fame Dev Patel plays Ramanujan. Even as he manages to bring the emotional turmoil of the man, his anglicised mannerisms do not much match with the poor Aiyangar youth Ramanujan was.

Jeremy Irons does a class act as G.H. Hardy, the tough Cambridge professor who turns out to be an admirer of Ramanujan. The friendly yet problematic relationship between the duo has been portrayed well on the screen. Devika Bhise plays Janaki, the wife of Ramanujan. She manages to portray the rustic young lady for whom life means her husband. At one point, she says she can only see colours or objects as they are, to which Ramanujan explains he sees a pattern in everything.

Cambridge is captured in all its beauty by Larry Smith. The film is indeed a tribute to the genius who placed India in the map of contemporary mathematics.

Now, let those who have watched Gnan Rajasekharan's Tamil biopic titled Ramanujan go for the comparison.