Many interesting and film-worthy anecdotes shaped the young Ramanujan. Even Wikipedia manages to give us a more vivid and interesting version of Ramanujan’s younger days than this film presents. The film’s portrayal of Ramanujan’s younger years is filled with stereotype scenes of rural India, featuring bullock-carts and huts. The film does not do full justice even to Ramanujan’s own pre-Cambridge period. The film, however, shows Ramanujan’s wife to be much older, denying and depriving the audience of the real and deeper understanding of the wife’s melancholy from her husband’s voyage seeking fame and recognition abroad. Child marriage was part of accepted customs of that period in rural India and continues to be in a few places even today. In real life, Janaki was a child, only ten years old, when she married Ramanujan. The plight of the real-life Janaki was far worse and could have been woven into the film to infuse more emotion into the film, something that the mathematicians dominating the film understandably lack. The film shows the young wife, lonely and lovelorn, yearning for her husband’s affections or at least for a few regular letters from him during his years away in England. Indian math prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)Īnd yet, the film is disappointing in many ways, underplaying and omitting some of the most interesting and emotional aspects of Ramanujan’s life and times.įor example, the film tries to tug at our hearts by the pensive portrayal of Janaki, Ramanujan’s wife, whom the mathematician left behind shortly after his marriage when he sailed away to Cambridge, England, to pursue his ambitions to publish his theorems. Matt Brown’s film tells us a sincere tale of Ramanujan’s truncated life and the conflicts and prejudices he had to survive to develop the treasure-trove of transcendental knowledge he left behind for future generations. Ron Howard’s 2002 film portrayal of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind presented the multiple dimensions of a brilliant mathematical mind with skill and commercial success. Srinivasa Ramanujan, the math prodigy who intuitively figured out some of the most mind-bending numerical conundrums confounding the best-educated mathematicians in the world, is a fitting hero for respectful tribute. The film crew reportedly spent a lot of effort and time to present Ramanujan’s early life in rural South India most authentically, including the depiction of the traditional ways of South Indian Tamil Brahmin women, and the way they wore their saris. We are told that the effort took twelve long years and that every dollar had to be stretched tenfold to make the film. The ambitions of Director Matt Brown and his crew who embarked on making this movie are laudable.

The man who knew infinity movie 2016