This well-meaning biopic about a lowly Indian Clerk who is a self-taught maths genius who at the beginning of the last century claimed he could “give meaning to negative values of the gamma function” a major feat that had baffled the most learned British professors for decades, sadly does not add up to much.
It is based on the true story of Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel) who is practically living rough in Madras. but has somehow managed to fathom out complicated mathematical formulae without any formal education at all. A senior colleague at work persuades their boss the very colonial British civil engineer Sir Francis Spring (Stephen Fry) of the importance of Ramanjan’s work to elicit introductions to Cambridge University Professors in the UK.
One of these is the very famous theorist GH Hardy (Jeremy Irons) who initially thinks that the letter from Ramanjan is a hoax. When he accepts that it is real and that he may have a genuine genius on his hands, he pays for the 25 year old Indian to leave home and come to study at the University. Ramanjan is desperate for his work to be published but Hardy, egged on by his disbelieving colleagues, insists that Ramanjan follows scholastic traditions and provide ‘the proofs’ of all his work before this can happen.
The University and all its inhabitants, with barely two exceptions, is steep in institutionalized racism which is hurled verbally, and physically, at Ramanjan at every possibility questioning both the validity of his work and his very presence on the campus. When a few months later WW1 breaks out, the xenophobia gets even worse, and a dejected Ramanjan now ill with TB, just wants to give up and go home.
However the relationship between him and confirmed bachelor Hardy is much better, but nevertheless an odd one. The older man is reluctant to stand up to his own convictions that Ramanjan is ‘the real thing’ until it is almost too late. His hesitation however like his colleagues bigotry. but is based on his complete inability to have any sort of personal relationship of any kind as he is totally oblivious to them all and spends his whole life completely emerged in mathematics instead.
Patel an affable actor who was well suited to his roles in Slumdog Millionaire and the Hotel Marigold movies, is completely out of his depth here, and totally fails with his attempt at portraying an earnest scholastic genius. In fact the only actor to fare well out of this rather disappointing drama is Irons as the conflicted Cambridge Don who comes good in the end.
With no real attempt to explain how this Clerk came to possess such a remarkable talent or any serious endeavor on the part of the filmmakers to enlighten us about a subject matter that is about as exciting to most people as watching paint dry, the movie falls really flat.
