Old Yorker

  • The Man Who Knew Infinity

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Matthew Brown (2015)

    David Leavitt’s The Indian Clerk, published in 2007, is a biographical novel inspired by the scholarly partnership and social relationship of the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) and his British mentor G H Hardy (1877-1947).  Gay themes have predominated in Leavitt’s novels.  In The Indian Clerk, he uses poetic licence to interpret the fact that Hardy never married and his remark that his academic collaboration with Ramanujan was ‘the one romantic incident in my life’.  Hardy may well have been attracted to men rather than women but it’s not certain that he was ever a practising homosexual.  The Hardy of the novel, however, although he doesn’t have a physical relationship with Ramanujan, is visited by the ghost – or, at least, extraordinarily vivid memories – of a dead male lover.  Hardy also has a short-lived sexual relationship with a British soldier wounded in the First World War, which forms a backdrop to much of the story.  Ramanujan had written to several British academics to try and interest them in his mathematical work; it was Hardy who perceived the great originality of Ramanujan’s insights and invited him to travel from his native Madras to England. Ramanujan’s arrival in Cambridge is a long time coming in the novel but Leavitt develops a range of really interesting characters.   As well as the two protagonists, there’s Hardy’s long-time collaborator John Littlewood; Hardy’s sister; a don’s wife, Alice Neville, who harbours a secret passion for Ramanujan; and the soldier lover.  As the book’s title suggests, Ramanujan is the central figure of the novel but he’s seen and animated largely through the perspectives of others, especially Hardy and Alice Neville.  Because they don’t fully understand him, Ramanujan retains a mystique that chimes with the unaccountability of his genius.

    The writer-director Matt Brown has based his screenplay not on The Indian Clerk but on Robert Kanigel’s non-fiction biography of 1991, The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan.  The Man Who Knew Infinity may be a commercially more promising title than The Indian Clerk (especially after The Theory of Everything) but Brown would have done better to develop his script from the David Leavitt novel.  (And Leavitt’s title is in fact very apt:   Ramanujan has not only work experience as a paper-pusher, in a shipping office, but also the anonymous quality supposedly typical of the breed:  this has the effect of making his intellectual gifts seem all the more remarkable.)  Perhaps Brown was put off by the dominance of the character of Hardy and/or by the gayness of Leavitt’s approach but the novel would have supplied a sound narrative structure and good dialogue.  Matt Brown’s script seems to aim no higher than to get through the main events of the story.  The early scenes in India are perfunctory.  Ramanujan sets off on what another character reminds him is a six-thousand-mile journey to England then, hey presto, he’s arrived in Cambridge.  He gets out of a cab at the gates of Trinity College and immediately – laughably – bumps into John Littlewood (‘Hello – are you Ramanujan?)  During his five years in England, Ramanujan’s mother conceals her son’s letters from his young wife, who assumes her husband has broken off contact and stops writing to him:  Matt Brown reduces this particular tragedy to a generic heartbreaking irony.  The racism experienced by Ramanujan during his time in Cambridge gives The Man Who Knew Infinity an occasional emotional charge but that’s because racism is inherently enraging – not because it’s imaginatively or even convincingly realised in the film.

    Ramanujan’s centrality is reflected not only in his being the pivotal character but also in the amount of time he has on screen – we don’t see him much even through Hardy’s eyes and certainly not through any others.  Since this is in all respects the lead role, the fact that it’s so poorly played and written is seriously damaging.  As portrayed by Dev Patel, Ramanujan is the complete reverse of the figure in the novel:  Patel’s lack of subtlety and of depth ensures he’s neither inconspicuous nor compelling.  Dev Patel’s limitations were clear enough in Slumdog Millionaire and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – he might well not have made more of Ramanujan even with a better script.  But The Man Who Knew Infinity wastes superior actors like Toby Jones (Littlewood) and Jeremy Northam and makes perfectly decent ones – Anthony Calf, the late Richard Johnson, Kevin McNally – look bad.  Northam is Bertrand Russell, who’s a cipher since Matt Brown pretty well ignores the public controversies around Russell’s pacifist activities during the Great War.  Calf and Johnson play malignantly hidebound representatives of the Cambridge establishment in a style befitting the script’s crude conception of their roles.  McNally follows suit, until his character sees the Ramanajun light and turns out to be a good egg after all.

    It’s especially frustrating that Jeremy Irons is restricted to signalling there’s much more to G H Hardy than meets the eye or ear. We’re told that Hardy is ‘married to mathematics’; Irons suggests, through the hints of sexual ambiguity that he conveys, this may be a euphemism.  Late on in the story, Hardy makes a remark that contrasts the orderliness of intellect and the messy uncertainty of emotions but the film never shows this tension at work in him.  Was it because Jeremy Irons hadn’t enough to do that he decided at one point to pronounce Ramanujan’s name two different ways in the space of two sentences?  (It makes sense for the Calf and Johnson characters to mispronounce the damned foreigner’s name but not for Hardy to.)  Matt Brown sets up oppositions between Ramanujan’s Hindu beliefs (he sees ‘every equation as a thought of God’) and Hardy’s atheism, between the Indian mystic’s intuitive approach to mathematics and the English rationalist’s insistence on proofs.  On the rare occasions Hardy’s and Ramanujan’s beliefs come into actual conflict, the results are incredibly feeble.  Ramanujan tells Hardy, ‘If you don’t believe in God, you don’t believe in me’.  Rather than responding to the effect that he respects Ramanujan’s beliefs without sharing them, Hardy replies that he can’t believe in God because God’s existence can’t be proved ‘but I believe in you’ (a turn of phrase that seems to belong in a biopic less po-faced than this one is).   Ramanujan breathes a sigh of relief and says ‘Thank you, sir’, as if he’s achieved some kind of victory.

    The Man Who Knew Infinity prefers to embark on a futile attempt to bring to dramatic life mathematical analysis, infinite series, and so on.  The maths that features in the dialogue was enough to get the film a favourable write-up in Nature but there’s no sense of any of the great minds on the screen being stimulated by their subject or their insights, except in the most obvious way:  Ramanujan repeatedly exclaims that he’s discovered something amazing, Hardy repeatedly reproves the young man’s lack of concrete evidence for the claims he’s making.  Their reactions to this film, as to The Theory of Everything, suggest that science journalists expect dramatic movies about great scientists to explain the content of their science rather than explore their personalities.  While the Sight & Sound review of Matt Brown’s film, by Matthew Taylor, recognises that number theory isn’t likely to make exciting drama, it finds The Man Who Knew Infinity disappointing because – as in The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game, according to Taylor – ‘a dizzyingly complex mind is given a well-mounted but rather workaday screen treatment’.   How, though, do you dramatise cerebration if it doesn’t translate into behaviour or incident?  There’s plenty wrong with Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind but that film did at least seem to be about what went on inside John Nash’s head:  it did so thanks to the severe psychological illness that turned Nash’s world upside down.  Srinivasa Ramanujan’s short life also had its fair share of tragedy but The Man Who Knew Infinity is a miserable film more in terms of quality than in emotional effect.

    3 May 2016

  • Paths of Glory

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stanley Kubrick (1957)

    Stanley Kubrick’s fourth feature, although an odd mixture of elements and styles, is compelling.  It’s easy to see why the film was publically controversial on its release and remained so for years afterwards (it wasn’t screened in France until 1975).  Based on the 1935 novel of the same name by Humphrey Cobb (adapted for the screen by Kubrick, Jim Thompson and Calder Willingham), Paths of Glory is set during the First World War.  Its characters are soldiers, of various ranks, of the French army.  It tells the story of an attempt by the French to make a breakthrough by taking a well-defended German position known as ‘the Ant Hill’.   When General Broulard proposes this attack to General Mireau, the latter initially dismisses the idea as doomed to failure; when Broulard suggests there might nevertheless be a promotion for Mireau in leading what will be, to a very considerable extent, a suicide mission for the regiment in question, Mireau makes an about turn.  The raid on the Ant Hill goes ahead, heavy casualties are sustained among the first wave of men, led by the regiment colonel Dax, and none of them advances beyond no man’s land into German trenches.  The next wave of soldiers refuses to leave their own trench.  The enraged Mireau orders his artillery to open fire on their colleagues to force them forward but the artillery officer-in-charge refuses to carry out this instruction without written confirmation of it.  After the debacle and in order to try and save face, Mireau orders the court martial of one hundred soldiers on charges of cowardice.  Colonel Dax suggests that he alone be court-martialled on behalf of the regiment.  The eventual compromise, advised by Broulard, is that three men – one from each company of the regiment – be court-martialled.  Dax defends them in the outrageously unfair proceedings which follow later that day and which result in all three being sentenced to death.  (Dax was a leading criminal lawyer in France in peacetime but his knowledge of the rulebook and adversarial skills count for nothing here.)  Sentence is duly carried out but not before Dax has done for Mireau by presenting Broulard with sworn statements that attest to the order Mireau gave to shell his own trenches.  Dax also refuses Broulard’s offer of Mireau’s job.

    Prior to this film, Kubrick’s features had been a military adventure (Fear and Desire (1953)) and two films noirs (Killer’s Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956)).  At eighty-three minutes, The Killing is the longest of the three.  You might expect Paths of Glory to be scaled very differently but Kubrick carries forward into it both narrative economy (the running time is only ninety minutes) and other characteristics of his earlier work.  Although Broulard and Mireau discuss the attack on the Ant Hill in the light and space of the chateau which is serving as military headquarters for the French general staff, their exchange of dialogue – both the writing and the editing of the sequence – brings to mind the planning of a more familiar kind of screen crime.  Kubrick wasn’t always a good director of actors and some of the cast here, although they’re striking camera subjects and might be vividly effective in a film noir, are unable to create stable characterisations.  This is particularly true of the volatile Timothy Carey, who plays one of the three soldiers court-martialled.  George Macready as Mireau isn’t a coherent personality either but this is less the actor’s fault than the script’s:  Mireau, who epitomises and pays the price for his atrocious military ambition, is one of the morals of the story rather than a character.  Richard Anderson, as Mireau’s aide-de-camp, is a conventionally villainous prosecutor in the court martial section, rather better when he reiterates the charges shortly before the firing squad sentence is carried out.   On the plus side, Adolphe Menjou, although he’s playing a caricature of military top brass, brings varied but consistent and nastily amusing detail to the role of General Broulard:  this affable, effortlessly self-protective fellow keeps smiling even when he’s turning the knife in Mireau.  Kirk Douglas provides no great surprises in his portrait of the valorous, dutiful and principled Dax but he strikes a good balance between passionate moral declamation and carefully hostile reserve.

    There’s a persistent tension between the strongly cinematic elements and the wordy script, in which the points of view that the characters represent are laid out as they might be in a stage play (the novel had been adapted for the stage, by Sidney Howard, in the year of its publication).   The contrasting settings are strongly atmospheric, especially the eerie opulence of the chateau.  The action in the trenches is imaginative and dynamic – not only the combat sequences but the travelling shots that describe Mireau’s inspection of the troops before the Ant Hill assault begins.  Kubrick makes a quick cut from the end of the court martial session to the preparations for carrying out the death sentence, emphasising quietly but incisively the miserable inevitability of the judgment.  The firing squad sequence is powerfully staged – with one of the three men, who fractured his skull in a fracas the night before in the condemned cell, practically unconscious but propped up to face the guns.  (Joe Turkel is good in this role.  Ralph Meeker is the third unlucky soldier.)

    The oddest sequence in the film is an addendum:  that’s what it feels like and, according to the BFI programme note, that’s what it was.  The French soldiers are drinking together, unaware they’re about to be recalled to action.  A frightened German girl is presented to them and you fear for what will happen to her.  (This, the only female part in the picture, is played by Susanne Christian aka Christiane Kubrick.)  When the girl starts singing a German folk song (Der Treue Husar), however, the mood changes; the rough soldiers are at first quietened by the quality of her voice then start singing along with her.  The sequence crystallises the opposition of Kubrick’s skill and instincts with what he appears to have been asked to do to make Paths of Glory more palatable to audiences.  The collection of faces and the movement of the camera across them are remarkable but the conception of the scene is false, a sentimental assertion of shared humanity.  How come the Frenchmen know the tune of a German song so well?

    15 May 2014

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