Mark Reviews Movies: ADVENTURES OF A MATHEMATICIAN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 30, 2021

A summation of one man's life and work amidst a most tumultuous and defining era of history, Adventures of a Mathematician doesn't add up to much (No pun intended). This is the story of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. military's program to develop the first atomic weapon, as seen from the prospective of Stanislaw Ulam, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, who was one of the key researchers on the project. This is one of those biographies that ends with a quick explanation of its subject's accomplishments, and for as little detail as this movie offers for Ulam's work, all we can do at the summary is shrug.

Director Thor Klein's screenplay never quite decides what it wants to do or focus upon when it comes to Ulam, known here as Stan and played by Philippe Tlokinski. It breezes through events, both personal and professional, while building toward the moment—the first test and later uses of atomic weapons—that will come to define Stan and, indeed, the course of history and the world. Shockingly, that moment and its consequences barely register here, as much as characters proceed to talk about and around it.

There's a lot of dallying, as mathematician Stan and his younger brother Adam (Matuesz Wieclawek) live, work, and study at Harvard, awaiting any news from their family at home, as the Nazis' violent expansion continues. Stan's best friend Johnny von Neumann (Fabian Kociecki) invites him to work at Los Alamos, where Stan could help the war effort with his most effective tool: his brain.

Everything is rushed. Stan's marriage to Francoise (Esther Garrel) arrives as a surprise, after he brashly proposes to her soon after meeting the woman at a party, finding her charming, and realizing that she, who is also Jewish, might have to return to Europe. Adam is sent off to New York City to live with an uncle and disappears from the story and even thought, until he shows up in a pair of scenes in the third act to add some last-minute conflict and regret to Stan's story.

In theory, none of the personal aspects of Stan's life matter, because he is solely fixated on the work at hand (That's the source of the disagreement with the brother and, later, the only bit of drama added to the marriage). Even here, though, Klein fails to give us an idea of the character's ideas, methods, and accomplishments.

The work unfolds slowly, vaguely, and with leaps forward in time. The gist of it is that Stan is working on a proposed, more destructive hydrogen bomb, overseen by Edward Teller (Joel Basman), and can figure out neither the physics nor, when an atomic bomb is soon to be created, the purpose of such a weapon. Stan is convinced the atomic bomb is only being developed as a deterrent—a promise of force that would end the war in Europe. A more powerful bomb is useless to that goal and likely detrimental to any kind of peace that would follow the war.

At the theoretical heart of this story is that ethical and moral debate about the creation and usage of nuclear weapons. The movie's most effective scenes feature these scientists reckoning with the possibilities and, after two atomic bombs are dropped on Japan, realities of a world in which such armaments of mass death and devastation exist, have been used, and can be used again. There are, perhaps, two or three of those scenes, so it's not exactly a sturdy foundation for philosophical debate and examination.

It's quite a shock how little of importance or consequence occurs in this story. At a certain point, one wonders if that it is Klein's purpose—juxtaposing the inconsequential course of one man's life against the world-changing events of which he was a part. When health issues strike Stan, we get to different shots of the character walking on or toward a beach. Each one is accompanied by a subtitle pointing out that a year has passed between the two shots, and any suspicion that this is some kind of between-the-lines telling of history is dashed.

Klein just wants to get from one year, one empty scene, and one more biographical detail to the next, whether or not it actually means or informs us of anything. Adventures of a Mathematician is a collection of such scenes, with only a few having anything of value to express, and chronological jumps, pointing toward a movie that's keener to get through its story than actually tell it.

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