Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons are set to star in the upcoming drama The Man Who Knew Infinity, and today the first trailer for the movie launched online. The story, for those unfamiliar, revolves around a young mathematician named Srinivasa Ramanujan (Patel) and the friendship he develops with English professor G.H. Hardy (Irons).
Okay, so that’s not exactly the most riveting set-up in the world, but the movie is based off of the book of the same name, “The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan,” which is a biography of the real-life Ramanujan. The story details the obstacles that the “self-taught genius” had to overcome to create a few ground-breaking mathematical theories.
Here’s the official synopsis:
Colonial India, 1913. Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel) is a 25-year-old shipping clerk and self-taught genius, who failed out of college due to his near-obsessive, solitary study of mathematics. Determined to pursue his passion despite rejection and derision from his peers, Ramanujan writes a letter to G. H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons), an eminent British mathematics professor at Trinity College, Cambridge. Hardy recognizes the originality and brilliance of Ramanujan’s raw talent and despite the skepticism of his colleagues, undertakes bringing him to Cambridge so that his theories can be explored.
The project began production in the fall of 2014, and officially premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. An early review by THR praised its unique subject matter, but mentioned that the overall execution and story-telling methods were “awfully familiar.” Given the earnestness of the trailer, that doesn’t sound like too far a stretch.
The movie is set to hit theatres in the US on April 29th, but United Kingdom residents who are interested won’t have long to wait – the math-heavy movie will be hitting theaters in that country on April 8th.
Check out images from The Man Who Knew Infinity below, and let us know what you think of the potential for the biopic in the comments.
