Adventures of a Mathematician (Klein, 2021)
Adventures of a Mathematician begins with one Jewish scientist telling another an extended joke where a man questions a rabbi about whether sex is “work” or “pleasure.”
The joke turns out to be an unfortunate epigram for the film, which shows the theoreticians at Los Alamos dutifully and earnestly wrestling with the moral implications of building an atomic bomb. It feels as though these arguments have been rehearsed thousands of times since the bomb’s inception, and while the arguments would be new and fresh to the characters, the film finds no way to make them new to us.
It’s important to get the bomb before Hitler. The United States only wants it as a deterrent. Antisemitism is more rampant in the fascist cultures that the Allies are fighting…and so on. The Jewish angle informs the way these men argue about their work to one another and, occasionally, to the women who might challenge their moral compass. It doesn’t really inform their characters as much as it should, perhaps because we rarely see them outside the context of work.
The other slight twist the film provides is a preponderance of gambling and gaming metaphors. Some of these are overtly drawn, and gaming theory is a fascinating subject in its own right, but the writing rarely delves deeper than the most obvious connections to be drawn through metaphors and math.
“This is not an equation,” Francoise says to Stan as he ticks off all the reasons why it is logical for them to get married or for him to make a hydrogen bomb, I forget which. Maybe that’s a bit of a catty comment, but it’s hard not to grumble when you feel a drama is written to a thesis. Math can be calculated precisely, human behavior can’t. Consequently, the arguments for helping build a bomb, while logical, also seem naive in retrospect. One scene illustrates the press-your-luck problem of probability — even low probability events increase in likelihood if you continue to play the game.
There’s nothing wrong with these arguments, but something like, say, HBO’s Chernobyl is able to integrate them better into human dramas rather than simply having human actors recite them as speeches.
Adventures of a Mathematician opens in select cities and on streaming platforms on October 1, 2021. It’s a reasonable streaming option for those not yet ready to brave the theaters in mid-pandemic, and perhaps there is a small window for modest dramas before awards-season bait starts dropping. Ultimately, however, it plays out a bit too much like a civics debate rather than actual human beings wrestling with an immensely difficult moral conundrum.
