The Man Who Knew Infinity (2016)

The Man Who Knew Infinity arrives as a biographical drama of the old school, adapted from Robert Kanigel's 1991 book, tracing Srinivasa Ramanujan from poverty in Madras to the cloisters of Trinity College, Cambridge, where G. H. Hardy waits with a chalkboard and a furrowed brow. It is a film about mathematics, tuberculosis, and the friction between an autodidact and an institution. Dev Patel plays Ramanujan, and the casting of an Indian actor in the role of an Indian man is a decision we can file under accuracy, not advocacy. The historical record did the work here, and nobody had to be congratulated for it.

The picture does engage with race, in its way. Ramanujan meets slights at Cambridge, a fellowship is denied for reasons of college politics and prejudice, and the chill of an English winter does what the plot requires. This is prejudice as period detail, part of the texture of 1914, not a lecture aimed at the audience. The film asks us to feel the injustice and then move along to the next theorem. There is a moral here about perseverance and the cost of being an outsider. It is delivered gently, almost apologetically, as though the filmmakers feared being caught making a point.

Elsewhere the film is a desert of contemporary signposting. No environmental lament, no assault on capital, no body positivity, no framing of Ramanujan's genius as neurodivergence. His wife waits in India and the film never converts her into a thesis about patriarchy. What remains is a sincere, slightly stodgy portrait of two men and a notebook. The result is respectable, conventional, and unlikely to trouble anyone's cultural priors, which may be the most radical thing a biopic can do in this decade.