Movie Reviews #28…
Money Monster. Jodie Foster, dir. With Hollywood A-listers like Julia Roberts and George Clooney, Jodie can’t miss, right? Wrong! First, Jack O’Connell, as the mad guy waving the gun and holding the dead-man’s switch to a suicide vest, steals the show, as does the crowd at the end who sympathize with him in his quest to expose yet another Wall Street sleazebag. Unlike Flash Boys, the book, which is real, this story about e-trading’s excesses seems a wee bit dated, contrived, and as farfetched as Clooney’s Jim Cramer-like character shapeshifting from Mr. Hyde to Dr. Jekyll in ninety minutes—par for the course for a movie using a screenplay not based on a book, I suppose.
And Mr. Clooney really doesn’t have to act to play the role of a one-percenter, does he, considering his $30K per plate dinner invitations for Wall Street’s favorite candidate? Roberts is OK stepping out of her comfort zone as everybody’s darling to take the role of the producer who tolerates the narcissism of Clooney’s character (again, some of that might be real). But, in the end, I really liked that Wall Street crowd rooting for the guy brandishing the gun. I felt like standing up and cheering like audiences did when Congress is destroyed in Mars Attacks or Debt of Honor, but Wall Street still survives, in real life and this movie. (Strong language and violence.)
The Man Who Knew Infinity. Matthew Brown, dir. Based on the book with the same title by Robert Kanigel. The moment I saw they released this movie, I knew I must see it. It is a celebration of genius and a tragedy, the story of Indian number theorist Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel) and his journey to greatness under the tutelage of G. H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons). The film takes place in Madras (now Chennai) and Cambridge, England, contrasting the two different worlds Ramanujan had to bridge over a very short time on this road to greatness.
This is equally a tale about Hardy. The fight for opportunity defines the great debates currently going on in the U.S. at this time. It took Hardy’s genius to recognize another genius from a Third World country who deserved a chance, to be big enough to see that the man had an incredible gift that the world of mathematics needed to experience. Genius can come from anywhere, and so too the ability to recognize it, even in the stodgy, monastic halls of Trinity College at Cambridge University.
You’ll meet other mathematical giants like John Littlewood (Toby Jones), a frequent Hardy collaborator, and mathematician/philosopher Bertrand Russell (Jeremy Northam), who befriended Ramanujan but was later banned from Cambridge for his antiwar views. The other Brits populating the place were less forward-thinking and filled with jealousy and bigotry, viewing Ramanujan as an upstart heathen. Like Mozart, the Indian genius died much too young at 32—the raw and damp climate at Cambridge, combined with malnutrition from the diet dictated by his religion and the lack of vegetables in a time of war, killed him. I’m inclined to blame some health problems on mental anguish too, caused by the hostile academic environment and a controlling mother who nearly ruined his marriage with her campaign to get him to return home.
Jeremy Irons is excellent as Hardy and Dev Patel does a convincing job of portraying the man who knew infinity in many ways. Hardy’s famous cricket bat only makes one appearance, though, and the famous cab with its plate number 1729 that caught Ramanujan’s interest when Hardy visited him in the hospital makes a cameo appearance twice—I suspect the second time shown in the movie never occurred. The number theorist remarked that 1729 is the smallest number that is the sum of the cubes of two positive numbers. (Ever since, these numbers are called “taxicab numbers.”) He said he received his insights from the Hindu goddess Namagiri. Like Hardy, I won’t give that old girl the credit—Ramanujan possessed a unique gift not seen before him and most likely not after.
The written epilogue at the end of the film represented a bit of new information for me: another notebook (two figured in the movie) discovered after Ramanujan’s death confirmed his claim in a letter to Hardy when Ramanujan lay dying that he had discovered a new type of function, what in later mathematical research came to be called mock modular forms. Ken Ono, a mathematician from Emory University, in 2012 showed how Ramanujan’s functions could be used to help explain black hole entropy, making a direct connection between the Indian mathematician and Stephen Hawking, perhaps a better known genius at Cambridge University.
Considering recent movies about mathematicians—A Beautiful Mind (John Nash), The Imitation Game (Alan Turing), and The Theory of Everything (Stephen Hawking)—The Man Who Knew Infinity is the best by far and a must for fans of such movies, as it should be for anyone who likes powerful acting and well-drawn characters and wants to go beyond Marvel comics and other Hollywood schlock to fine movie making.
***
Rogue Planet is now available for all reviewers on Net Galley.
The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan. This novel, which is a bridge between the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” and the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy,” considers the following question: how will the U.S. government in the future handle all those old people with classified secrets in their head? This is just a Smashwords sale. The book will be priced at $0.99 until June 1, reduced from $2.99. The coupon code is MP45S (type that in when you order—be sure and specify the format you want). Pass the word to your relatives and friends.
In libris libertas…
