Dev Patel, ‘Infinity’ make math seem almost inspiring

The Man Who Knew Infinity takes an incredible true story — about an impoverished Indian man whose Jedi math skills helped him triumph over race, class and bad food in early 20th century England — and telescopes it into a well-made and heartfelt yet predictable tale of uplift and inspiration.

Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) is Srinivasa Ramanujan, a young man in Madras who seems destined for a life of poverty and servitude. Yet he is obsessed with numbers, formulae and mathematical theory, much to the consternation of those around him, including his wife (Devika Bhise) and mother. But Ramanujan gets a job as a clerk for a man who sees something in him that others don’t.

Through a contact, the boss gets some of Ramanujan’s work to G.H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons), a mathematics professor at Cambridge University’s Trinity College.

Hardy is struck by Ramanujan’s genius — one that blossomed in total isolation with little support — and sends for him to come to England and learn how to mold his brilliance into something that stuffy British academe, and the wider scientific world, will accept.

The Man Who Knew Infinity then becomes a classic fish-out-of-water story. Ramanujan gets yelled at for walking on the Trinity lawn, he goes hungry because dining halls in the 1900s didn’t serve many vegetarians, and he becomes the object of racism in the classroom as well as an assault on the street for being brown.

Yet none of that dimmed his passion for mathematics, and today, he is considered a visionary whose work remains influential in the field. Patel is very good at channeling that passion, turning in one of his strongest performances.

But writer/director Matthew Brown, working from a biography by Robert Kanigel, undercuts him and the character’s struggle with a film where much seems to be trimmed or missing in order to get Ramanujan’s life wedged into a manageable biopic form.

Ultimately, The Man Who Knew Infinity feels emotionally blunted and ends up walking a path of so many other films, such as The Imitation Game, about an outcast math wizard at odds with “the real world.”

That’s not a totally a bad thing. The Man Who Knew Infinity has much to recommend it. But this is one case where the cinematic math could have added up to more.

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This story was originally published May 12, 2016 at 11:32 AM with the headline "Dev Patel, ‘Infinity’ make math seem almost inspiring."