Spoilers ahead…
The first few scenes in Gnana Rajasekaran’s Ramanujan, which details the life of the mathematics genius, are all about the acknowledgement of the man’s genius. As a boy, he baffles his teacher with an astute argument about the value of zero. Thereon, he baffles college-goers, a ticket collector on a train, the headmaster of his school –the word “genius” is frequently bandied about. The wide-eyed headmaster exclaims, “Not a single mistake” when a look would have sufficed – this is not a film that’s shy about letting the dialogue do most of the heavy lifting. Later, men in influential positions recognize that this is someone special, and that he should not be saddled with lowly jobs. He should be left free to continue his research. (And he still gets his salary.) It looks like a dream life. And yet, the crux of the film is how underappreciated Ramanujan (Abhinay Vaddi) was in his own country.
Perhaps the point is that he wasn’t as appreciated as he was in Cambridge University, when Professor GH Hardy (Kevin McGowan) took “the Indian clerk” under his wing and showcased his work to the world – but we don’t see how Ramanujan could claim that he was unrecognized and that he was struggling for two square meals a day. (We hear it; we don’t see it.) Ramanujan is evidently a labour of love and even a necessary film – in an age where we don’t read as much as we watch movies, cinematic representations of important people and events are extremely valuable – but it doesn’t flesh out its central conceit, the contrast between the supposedly miserable life the mathematician led in India and the (relative) bliss he found abroad. All the while, it appears that Ramanujan was far better off than his fellow clerks, who still had to slave away at their desks, when he was given a private chamber in which to coddle his genius.
How much of a life do we need to see to get a sense of the man? A biographer needn’t address this question – books are languorous affairs. But a filmmaker must pick and choose events and shape his material, especially when the material keeps us at an arm’s length. When we watch Amadeus, we are drawn into Mozart’s life because the music draws us in. In Gnana Rajasekaran’s own Bharathi, the rousing poetry drew us in. But mathematics isn’t something you can put up on screen. The director doesn’t go in for flashy filmmaking, the kind we saw in A Beautiful Mind, where the scene where the protagonist cracks a code is presented in way that makes us feel that he is in some kind of mystical communication with numbers. Here, we only see Ramanujan hunched over his papers, and that’s not enough. I don’t know what could have been done to draw us into Ramanujan’s beautiful mind, but by the end, we are left distant observers, not vicarious participants.
The film runs nearly three hours and it’s puzzling why it needed to. Did we really need two separate scenes where the professor played by Radha Ravi proclaims what a genius Ramanujan is? Did we really need two separate scenes where we’re shown that Ramanujan did not have paper to scribble his theorems on? Did we really need to be introduced to Hardy’s sister Gertrude? There appears to have been no effort to streamline the events of Ramanujan’s life. Instead of an organic narrative, we’re left with an information-dispensing device spitting out one plodding scene after another. This happened. Then that happened. Then this happened. And then that happened. The casting doesn’t help. Abhinay Vaddi was reportedly chosen because he resembles Ramanujan, but he is unable to put across a character we can root for or empathize with.
The writing, too, fails to make Ramanujan interesting, the way Mozart was in Amadeus, or Bharathiyar was in Bharathi. We get all the exterior details – the “eccentricities”; Ramanujan speaks to flowers the way Bharathiyar embraced a donkey – but the most interesting aspects of Ramanujan’s inner life remain undramatized. The key to man, it appears, is that he was a believer when most Western mathematicians were rationalists. (The Cambridge scenes, filled with bad actors dubbed into Tamil, are unintentionally funny.) This is what sets Ramanujan apart from other underappreciated geniuses like van Gogh and Kafka and Keats (who is the subject of a classroom lecture here; Ramanujan, unsurprisingly, is busy solving a maths problem). He says that he sees his family deity, Namagiri Thaayar, in his dreams, and he has the answers to his maths problems when he wakes up. (He’s literally doing sums in his sleep.) Why not take us into these dreams? And why not explain his timidity? As a boy, he faints while watching a play about the story of Prahlada, when Narasimha disembowels Hiranyakashipu. But this incident is a one-off, and without knowing more, all we’re left with is a rather weak and snivelly individual who gets tiresome after a point. Hardy, too, never coheres into a living-breathing character. It’s understandable that the much-debated gay angle of his relationship with Ramanujan is not explored, but even otherwise, barring one fascinating sliver of insight about his relationship with mirrors, he has all the weight and depth of a Disney-era fairy godmother. He’s just there to wave a white-man’s wand and fix Ramanujan’s problems.
There’s some good music by Ramesh Vinayagam. (Vinkadandha jothiyaai is particularly exquisite, and its placement in the narrative is perfect.) And there are good performances by Y Gee Mahendran (as Ramanujan’s colleague) and ‘Nizhalgal’ Ravi (as Ramanujan’s father). But if Ramanujan comes to life at all, it’s in the scenes with Suhasini, who plays Ramanujan’s mother. The character is the Tam-Brahm answer to the domineering dragon-mothers from the Tennessee Williams plays, and the only time I laughed is when she snubs her meek daughter-in-law Janaki (Bhama). I wished we were watching her story instead. She wants to control her son’s life, and she keeps scheming to keep him away from Janaki. All of this is garden-variety melodrama, right out of the Visu handbook, but there’s at least a vulgar, what-next curiosity in these portions, the satisfaction of seeing recognizable human beings instead of abstract theorists and dreamers. The great man deserved a better movie.
KEY:
* the Indian clerk = see here
* Amadeus = see here
* Bharathi = see here
* A Beautiful Mind = see here
* Namagiri Thaayar = see here
* Prahlada = see here
* much-debated gay angle = see here and here
* Ramesh Vinayagam = see here
* Vinkadandha jothiyaai = see here
* Y Gee Mahendran = see here
* ‘Nizhalgal’ Ravi = see here
* dragon-mother = see here
* the Visu handbook = see here
An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.
Niranjan
July 12, 2014
I haven’t seen the movie, so what I am about to write now perhaps would be pointless, but I frankly think that the idea of making a movie on Ramanujan was perhaps ill-timed in the sense that his life story has remained shrouded in all kinds of mystery and mysticism. It is rather shameful that the best biography of the man,” The man who knew Infinity” by Kanigel tells us that this happened, then that happened and so on.
As a mathematician myself I think that it is a little too hard to get across to the general public what exactly it is that a mathematician does. Folks around me (the non-academic ones, including scores of relatives) can at best understand that I teach; beyond that, they imagine that I like making long columns of numbers and adding them up, or multiplying them, and no wonder they think my priorities need readjustment.
In fact, the movie ‘A Beautiful Mind’ too tries being flashy and in the end, all that ones gets is that this man could stare at numbers and then do something – though no one had a darned clue what that something was. Actually some of Nash’s work in geometry and parabolic partial differential equations is actually spectacular, but that is perhaps too esoteric for any producer to even think that could make a movie.
Depiction of mathematicians in the movies has only been dramatic when the concerned character is a genius and has something mentally wrong with him/her (the other such example was ‘Proof’ – again a mathematician’s nightmare movie). So much so, that there was an article in the Bulletin of the AMS which complained about how the common man’s notion that mathematicians are crazy is only getting bolstered with these movies!
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Kiruba
July 12, 2014
there was a series of books called “நாட்டுக்கு உழைத்த நல்லவர்” published by Pazhaniappa brothers (I wonder if they are still churning out such books) that we read as part of the Tamil syllabus (the so called non-detail texts) in secondary school. Pretty interesting at that age, though they are just the vital events in these great lives strung together as books by unnamed authors.
It felt as if Gnanrajasekaran dutifully followed one of these books in both Bharathi and Periyar. Nothing wrong in attempting to recreate an entire life on film, but guaranteed to result in underwhelming cinema.
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Ravi K
July 13, 2014
Kiruba, I only saw Bharathi, but I agree. The direction of the film did not have the poetry of Bharathiyar’s work. It was like watching an indifferently made telefilm. It’s not enough to merely recreate bullet-points from someone’s life and call that a biopic.
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The Guy Next Door (@guy_in_london)
July 13, 2014
A Ramanujan Documentary was made in 2013. What do you think of it? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2861842/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2
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Kiruba
July 13, 2014
“A young couple plays havoc with the union of an older couple”
http://www.thehindu.com/features/cinema/cinema-reviews/they-got-the-formula-wrong/article6203946.ece
What do you mean?
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brangan
July 13, 2014
Kiruba: Yes, but there are those who don’t view this as “cinema” — just as a fount of information. And I guess the film works for them.
Ravi K: Actually, “Bharathi” was much better. The central character was more well-defined and the period was also more well-created.
The Guy Next Door: I haven’t seen it.
Kiruba: That’s some mistake. If you see the print version, it says it’s the story of a mathematician.
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Srini
July 13, 2014
Off Topic : Will you be writing anything on the Dawn of the Apes? Been hearing good things about it
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brangan
July 13, 2014
Got this comment on email. Anyone else having this problem?
“This past week I’ve been experiencing a weird issue with your site. Often within a few minutes, a series of endless pop-ups will keep popping up, causing me to have to force quit my browser. It’s happened to me on Chrome and on Firefox on two separate computers. Has anyone else complained about this?”
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venkat
July 14, 2014
Yes this happened to me once when I tried to click on Like for a comment. I had to quit Firefox.
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Sundararajan Mohan
July 14, 2014
I am not seeing any issues with your site.
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Rahini David
July 14, 2014
BR: No. I don’t face this problem with your site.
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Srinivas R
July 14, 2014
BR , I faced that issue once last week with Chrome when I cliked on “Like”, not happened again since then.
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ram murali
July 14, 2014
I just faced the issue (with pop-ups) that you are describing.
hope to watch this movie since u said that there are some good supporting performances from ppl I feel have been given a raw deal in tamil cinema like shadows (!) and ygeem.
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Shankar
July 14, 2014
Well, I wanted the movie to be good but going by what you say, it seems to be a lost opportunity. The film maker should have picked a thread and explored around it rather than attempt a biopic. I liked Good Will Hunting because it was all about the central character and the complexities in his life and the background with him being a genius in math.But then this director is only known to make biopics! Some work and some don’t…
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MJ_CFC
July 16, 2014
SPOILERS AHEAD
The questions I have: how did Komalam select Janaki for Ramanujan? She should have checked their jathagams prior to their marriage. If she came to know they weren’t made for each other, why was the marriage arranged? Or if they were fit, why did Komalam go and check again? Because he was doing good in Chennai when she finds out they shouldnt be together. Anyone knows?
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MJ_CFC
July 16, 2014
Overall I liked the film, wasnt expecting anything spectacular or entertaining but gave me an idea about his life, I like reading experiences of other people, so liked it. Same with Periyar, I knew nothing about him, knew more about him only from the movie, so thanks to Rajasekaran. Music was a let down for me, Ilaiyaraaja would’ve done more justice because of his native touch. I am sure Rajasekaran misses him so much in his films, he must be aware of it.
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Niranjan
July 16, 2014
“Because he was doing good in Chennai when she finds out they shouldnt be together. Anyone knows? ”
MJ_CFC: There is possibly some cinematic element here but from what I know of his biography, (and I have heard a senior mathematician once say this during a banquet) – Ramanujan’s mother was the typical tamil brahmin ‘mamiyaar’ (mother-in-law) of that time – basically a young woman’s nightmare. In fact Kanigel’s biography records certain events in his life after he returned from London, when his mother’s jealousy towards her daughter-in-law was so stark that Ramanujan had to intervene on behalf of his wife. I don’t know if anything like this appeared in the film.
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MJ_CFC
July 16, 2014
Forgot to write *Spoilers* in my comment, Barad can you please add if you dont mind.
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MJ_CFC
July 18, 2014
*Spoilers*
Niranjan: Yes, the movie has scenes about his mother’s jealousy and her tactics to keep them separated. They have come out well and let us wonder why she is doing it. Towards the end she tells her husband that Janaki shouldn’t be with Ramanujan because his jathagam warns that if he is close to Janaki, he will die at young age. At that moment I felt the way she treated Janaki was justified but left me confused about the jathagams mismatch. That is the reason I raised those questions. Was it true what she was saying or she just justifying her acts? I know it is very difficult to answer.
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MJ_CFC
July 18, 2014
Has anyone found certain similarities between the Dharumi character and Ramanujan? I felt there are some. Dharumi-Ramanujan, Hardy-Shenbaga Pandian, Nakkeeran-his rival colleagues.
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MJ_CFC
July 18, 2014
And ofcourse Namakiri goddess – Lord Shiva.
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blurb
March 21, 2017
Just caught up with The Man Who Knew Infinity over the weekend.
The movie just didn’t work for me, but unable to articulate why. Looks like they treated the character of Ramanujan as that of a generic Indian’s. 1. Dev Patel’s accent didn’t have the innate South-Indian-ness in it. The inflections in his dialogue delivery were off. For example, I understand why others call him ‘raama-noojan’, but it was painful to see himself do that. 2. The timidity that he so desperately tries to portray through his body language seemed forced. 3. After reaching England, the ardent Vaishnavite out a… Shiva idol. For someone to whom his faith is so central and inspirational for his work, they should have paid more attention to this.
It was just callously done.
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