There’s too much talk of primes, partitions, and other mathematical terms, but the human elements that separate the man of humble origins from his implacable professors make Ramanujan’s need to be accepted for his mind in a hostile faraway country a universally sympathetic element in the story. And back in India, his letters pleading for his wife to join him were hidden by his resentful mother. Meanwhile, he came down with tuberculosis. The math wizard’s proposed fellowship was denied. The road to posterity was paved with speed bumps. The film is irritatingly slow, but its subject is validly and intelligently examined in the solid screenplay by Matthew Brown, who also directed. Humiliations, racial insults, and even violence escalated. He enraged his instructors during his five years at Trinity College because he knew more than they did, and he could solve theorems they had not even thought of yet. Even in suits, he insisted on wearing sandals because English shoes pinched his feet and restricted his mobility. A vegetarian, he couldn’t eat the food, and he was more comfortable sleeping on the floor. Defying tradition and against his mother’s wishes, he traveled 6,000 miles to a new and daunting world on the verge of World War I only increased suspicion and rejection of an “exotic” foreigner invading the closed ranks of old guard British society. Hardy (Irons), everyone was astounded by the resulting invitation to advance his studies in England except the boy himself. “No” was a negative that did not exist in his vocabulary, so when his employer in Madras suggested he send some samples of his theories to Professor G. Ramanujan had no class distinction, no formal training, and no credentials, but he had self-assurance, a genius for numbers, and an ego to match. Its craft is evident, its sincerity is admirable, and it’s the kind of movie about which you can say “There’s not a hair out of place” and mean it.

A biopic about Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan might not sound like the stuff that lures long lines to the box office, but with Dev Patel ( Slumdog Millionaire) as the brilliant but poor young idealist from Madras with no formal training and no credentials, who beat the odds and cracked the barriers to fame, and Jeremy Irons as the Cambridge academic who acted as his reluctant mentor, the story comes alive in The Man Who Knew Infinitywith a humanity that overcomes its Masterpiece Theater stodginess.

The man who knew infinity movie 2016