The movie has its faults. Critics have not been particularly kind. Yet, The Man Who Knew Infinity is charming, and captures the improbable relationship between two great mathematicians in a manner that is comfortable for both Western and Indian audiences. It is neither an English story told from an Indian point of view nor the reverse. This middle path makes for enjoyable watching, and raises the question: would you rather enjoy a movie, suspending disbelief, or nitpick and feel superior to the movie makers?
The movie had me rereading Robert Kanigel’s book on which it is based, also A Mathematician’s Apology by G H Hardy (which Graham Greene called “the best account of what it was like to be a creative artist”), C P Snow’s essay on Hardy in his Variety of Men , and the fascinating story of Ken Ono, 48, the American mathematician in whose personal and professional life Ramanujan played a major role. All this while waiting for Amazon to deliver Ono’s My Search for Ramanujan .
Enjoyable movies get you involved. Which is not to say that you suspend your critical faculties; you merely override them.
“If art isn’t entertainment”, wrote the acerbic Hollywood critic Pauline Kael, “what is it? Punishment?”
Is exchanging pleasure for censure worth it? If you enjoyed Batman v Superman , should you worry about what critics said about the movie? To quote Kael again, “We read critics for their perceptions; for what they tell us that we didn’t fully grasp when we saw the work. The judgement we can usually make for ourselves.”
Sadly, most critics share their judgements rather than their perceptions.
C P Snow, the novelist and Hardy’s friend, called the mathematician the “purest of the pure.” He was, he said, “unorthodox, eccentric, radical, ready to talk about anything.” He was also a staunch atheist.
Ramanujan, wrote Kanigel, “was shy, his geniality emerging among a few friends. Nor was he particularly attuned to interpersonal nuance. His humour ran towards the obvious…. There was something so unassuming, so transparent about him that it melted distrust.”
Ramanujan’s belief in God was matched by Hardy’s lack of it; his intuitive methods were at the opposite end of the scale from the Western tradition of order and proof. Yet, the two had the lack of interpersonal nuance in common!
Pure mathematicians rile against the “usefulness” of their work. In his book – simultaneously sad and uplifting, depressing and inspiring – Hardy says, “I have never done anything ‘useful’. No discovery of mine has made or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world.”
Hardy was a cricket fan, and his highest form of praise was to say that someone was in the “Bradman class”. He told his sister, “If I knew I was going to die today, I should still want to hear the cricket scores.”
A movie cannot take all this in, obviously. Yet, if it inspires the viewer into digging deeper, then other opinions don’t matter.
