The Men Who Know Nothing

Let’s get the plot out of the way.

Ramanujan is a penniless math whiz kid in Madras trying to find a job. Every job he seeks is denied to him by racist Englishmen. He finally manages to get one thanks to the kindness of an Indian official and a benevolent Stephen Fry.

He writes a letter to G. H. Hardy at Cambridge. Hardy recognizes his genius and brings him over to England and does everything he can to teach the boy the right way of doing mathematics. He stands up to the other mathematicians at Cambridge who don’t believe in Ramanujan. With persistence and eloquence he gets him made Fellow of both the Royal Society and Trinity College. Ramanujan, beset by tuberculosis and bad vegetarian food, returns to India and dies.

That’s a lot of talk about Hardy, you might think. It’s no accident. Ramanujan often turns into an oriental prop in this film: his full identity reduced to its projection onto the axis of his nationality.

The Man Who Knew Infinity is a bad film. This is not just a complaint about historical accuracy: if it was entirely fictional it would still be a bad film.

The first act gets over in a hurry; emotionless scenes filled with exposition. Instead of grounding us in Ramanujan’s life in the village and Madras, it treats that part of his life as a dreary formality to get through before the camera can be pointed at Jeremy Irons and the lush lawns of Cambridge. When we do get to Cambridge, the moment doesn’t land because we haven’t been immersed in India enough for the contrast with Cambridge to become apparent. The writers know this, and hence we get this bit of dialogue when Ramanujan and Littlewood enter the quad (or whatever) and look upon the statue of Newton:

LITTLEWOOD: “Ah, the intended effect”.

No, idiots. The intended effect should have happened to me without you pointing it out through dialogue.

The character introductions of the Englishmen are similarly rushed (except Hardy, Littlewood and Russell):

“Hello, my name is John J Englishman. You are Indian and I am racist.”

There is the matter of South India. Let us accept that Hollywood couldn’t find a single actor to play Ramanujan other than the one guy they know: Dev Patel. Let us sigh over what the film could have been if, as rumored, Ramanujan had been played by Madhavan, an actual, South Indian, Tamil-speaking, plump (like Ramanujan) actor instead of a lean British-Indian.

One would think that the first thing Mr. Patel would do after landing the role is learn to pronounce ‘Ramanujan’. Instead we get an attempt no better than that of the white guy from Good Will Hunting, with stretches and stresses in all the wrong places.

The film’s biggest missteps are in its portrayal of Ramanujan’s character and his relationship with Hardy.

In real life, Hardy was a mere ten years older than Ramanujan. Jeremy Irons, who plays Hardy, was born in 1948. He is now older than the Indian Republic. He is also old enough to be Dev Patel’s grandfather.

While there was a paternal element to their relationship, it wasn’t as stark as the 30-year age difference would indicate. Hardy famously spoke of Ramanujan as “the one romantic incident in my life”. In the film, Hardy is a stern schoolmaster and Ramanujan is a petulant but genius child.

When I see Dev Patel’s portrayal of Ramanujan, all I see is Slumdog Mathematician. The real Ramanujan by all accounts was a man of wit and humor. The Ramanujan in the film is nothing like that. He is a supplicant, running around Cambridge while he’s being tutored in formal mathematics by inferior mathematicians and being humiliated for his race every single day.

The central tension of the film is also more invention than fact: a conflict of east v/s west, Ramanujan’s intuitive methods against the formal western methods of mathematics.

Ramanujan was no noble mathematical savage. Yes, when he was young he learned math from a textbook of doubtful rigor and he didn’t always provide proofs for his results. Yes, he had an extraordinary intuition for coming up with results that made Hardy exclaim in wonder, “these have to be true, because if they were false no man would have the imagination to invent them”. He’d also been published in Indian journals before he left for England and certainly knew what a proof was.

But a screenplay needs conflict and we get one.

The first manifestation of this conflict is in two conversations between Hardy and Ramanujan about the origin of his mathematical insights. The first time, Ramanujan simply says he just knows. The second time he mocks Hardy’s atheism and tells him that his Goddess puts the theorems on the tip of his tongue.

Given the way Ramanujan has been portrayed thus far in the film, it’s hard not to see this as an instance of that familiar trope, the “mystical” oriental. No one would dare suggest that an English mathematician gets his results from his God just because he happens to be Christian (devout or not). Yet the movie uncritically accepts the assertion that Ramanujan’s math is given to him by his goddess. It does the most egregious thing imaginable, it denies math to Ramanujan, the one thing that above all else defined his life.

The second, more dramatic appearance of this conflict is in the scene where Hardy is arguing that Ramanujan should be made a Fellow of Trinity College. This is one of the few good scenes in the film, with Jeremy Irons expounding on the nature of truth and mathematics until interrupted by a rude question:

“Are we supposed to take him at his word?”

“No, you are supposed to take him at mine”, says Hardy, full of passion.

Well, okay then. I do wish though that the crowning moment of awesome in this film belonged to Ramanujan, not Hardy.

Ramanujan’s life story is one of genius and triumph. The triumph of a man disadvantaged by circumstance but with an intellect that shone so bright that nothing could keep it hidden. But where is his triumph in the film? Throughout, we only see Ramanujan being taunted, belittled, disbelieved, hungry, on the verge of tears and struggling to prove his worth. When he eventually does get his due, all we see is a triumphant Hardy.

This is a movie written and made by men who know nothing.