Rating: 4 stars out of 5 (excellent)

Writer-Director: Matthew Brown

English, 2016

The life of Srinivasa Ramanujan ranks as both a great treasure and an immense lost potential in the history of modern knowledge. He bequeathed to us, a mountain of pioneering mathematics that continues to inspire and awe the best minds in the field. Drawing on Thomas Kanigel's book, writer-director Matthew Brown marries fact and cinema with exemplary finesse in this biopic about the iconic Indian mathematician, while never forgetting to inject the requisite dramatic energy.

Born in 1887 in Kumbakonam, a humble town in the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Ramanujan grappled with penury and the lack of an academic degree even as his staggering mathematical intuition made him conjure up complex unheard-of formulas. His pleas for guidance finally caught the attention of G.H Hardy - a leading Cambridge mathematician who brought Ramanujan over to the prestigious university. Clash of methodology, culture and religious beliefs aside, Hardy held Ramanujan's talent in the highest esteem, putting him in the same rarefied level as "Euler and Jacobi". They eventually collaborated on acclaimed papers that finally merited the latter the Fellowship of the Royal Society.

The opening sequences in Kumbakonam sport a carefully composed mise en scène that unwittingly misses the redolence of the real India. Done-to-death flute music, with little tune variations, permeates the film with its melodramatic cloy. But the picture admirably allocates enough space and sensitivity to show Ramanujan's disrupted marital life (their real-life age difference was much more awkward).

Jeremy Irons is pitch-perfect in his performance as G H Hardy. With a consistently droll sense of humour, he comes across as a tough world-weary Cambridge don who reserves a very honest and good heart. The film is terrific in showing how he calmly and relentlessly instructs the increasingly frustrated Ramanujan that showing methodical proofs is more important than miraculously birthing incredible formulae.

Dev Patel, in a commercially safe casting choice, essays Ramanujan - as though he were expected to pull off a different kind of 'Slumdog Millionaire'. Patel is a British-bred actor of Gujarati ancestry and though he is intense and reasonably convincing in the film, I did not find the expected Tamilian either in his speech or physicality (accents aside, the real-life Ramanujan had a fullness of face and body unlike the lean Patel).

Regrettably, we never witness Patel being given his personal space for reflection, so that we could glimpse more of the man behind that vaulting genius. But one of Brown's best triumphs is evidenced in his indirect way of showing the film's terminal event, and the hidden reason behind this choice. We see exquisite emotion in a person in whom we never saw that depth of feeling before.

The film is unflinching in showing the violent jealousy and racial hatred that additionally afflicted Ramanujan's progress. A strict Brahmin transplanted to a land where vegetarianism was only a little less rare than were mango trees, he felt obliged to cook his own food, and half-starved with irregular meal-times and demanding work. World War I thundered in with its own set of horrors and shortages. The screenplay pulls no punches in revealing how doomed the young man felt.

We may never know whether it was tuberculosis, hepatic amoebiasis or some other agent of doom, that brought on the fevers, deliriums, aches and coughs that haunted Ramanujan. The irony is that while proofs for his dazzling formulae were continually asked of Ramanujan, there was no laboratory proof of tuberculosis for which he was continually treated to no avail. Doctors failed this great mathematician, otherwise he would have lived longer but the movie is not interested in further investigating this key issue.

That should not detract from the fact that Brown marshals his actors' abilities, recreates a yesteryear Cambridge and builds emotion, all so effectively that, though I had keenly sifted through Ramanujan's life several times in the past, I felt all the more deeply for this great man at the movie's end.