Infinity (1996)

Excellent adaptation.

Best movie ever!

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Most of this movie concentrates on the life of Nobel Prize physicist Richard Feynman (born in 1918), roughly from age twenty to twenty-seven. During this time he got his Ph.D. from Princeton and participated in the Manhattan Project. Also in that time frame he met and married Arline Greenbaum. There are a couple of scenes, with Feynman being around the age of six, that establish his inquiring mind and his relationship with his father, but the main thrust of the movie details the relationship between Richard and Arline.Having read Feynman's books "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" and "What Do You Care What Other people Think," as well as having viewed several of his videos on YouTube, I felt that this movie did not capture what I perceive as Feynman's impishness and openness. Maybe this was because during the time period covered Feynman was dealing not only with his early career challenges but also with the serious health problems of Arline. I thought the movie did a good job of detailing how Feynman coped with the difficult conflict between his professional ambitions and his love and devotion to Arline.I suppose most people's image of the 1940s comes from looking at bleached out color photos and videos from that time. Whoever decided on the lighting for this movie must have been under the impression that that is what things looked like at the time, since there seems to be some sepia-toned cast to much of the film. I suppose the desire was to add some sense of nostalgia for a past era, but I found the rather dark filming fosters an overall fogginess.Feynman's academic career was glossed over with there being little desire to inform the audience as to what his scientific interests were. There was no mention of what his contributions were to the Manhattan Project, or why he was chosen to go to Los Alamos. There was some odd editing like the insertion early on of a hand tossing out small pieces of paper from atop a wooden post. After the atomic blast at Alamogordo there is a scene of Fermi doing some measurements of how the pieces of paper were scattered in order to estimate the power of the blast, but this was not made clear enough for most people to make the appropriate deduction. Also, the movie has Feynman looking at the atomic blast with unaided eyes which would have caused retinal burns.The score tries to be manipulative, but winds up being intrusive. Every time there is a tender moment some sappy music is played.I wish this movie could have given more of a hint of Feynman's being a witty, free-spirited genius, which I think he was.

Although I agree with other reviewers that the reaction of the Feynman character to his wife's death is so restrained as to appear cold, that is but a minor flaw in a striking film featuring a fantastic performance by Patricia Arquette.I have seen many tearjerkers in my life, but this is one of the few that actually makes me choke up when I remember certain scenes.The characters' integrity, the tragic backdrop of the Manhattan Project, the revealing details, the respectful rendering of quaint aspects of the era, the simple truths simply portrayed all make this a small masterpiece.

Infinity is not a masterpiece nor even great cinema (but do we hold it on account of that?), but it does have something that I really loved about it. I adore Richard Feynman, he being my favourite scientist and one of my two heroes (the other being Itzhak Perlman) to really try to aspire to be everything I can be. I think everyone should read his books (even his Physics lectures, even if you hate Physics. He makes everything worthwhile). Onto the film... The film starts out with the sweet, gentle relationship between father and son, taking direct quotes from Feynman's own novels (he actually didn't write them; they are accounted stories) Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! and What Do YOU Care What Other People Think? and letters and such. It progresses through Richard's days in high school, to meeting Arline (that is the correct spelling) onto MIT and Princeton (pre Los Alamos). During this, my biggest complaint would be that the film moved way too fast. There were some lines ("Look I'm gorgeous") that were just beginning to show Feynman's character and his way with humour, but it plowed right through them onto the next scene. I think Broderick was so intent on keeping everything to the book, he forgot some very vital elements of what made "Richard Feynman" Richard Feynman. What really grasped Feynman's character was when the film steered into the direction of Feynman's days at Los Alamos (working on "the bomb") and Arline was at the sanatorium. The film showed just how much fun Arline had with Feynman and vice versa (I loved that the film included Feynman's birthday present from Arline!). It also showed the tenderness, yet sometimes almost "absent" love of Feynman. In Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Tack: the letters of Richard Feynman, he writes a letter to Arline before she dies telling her how he wished he would have been there for her more, loved her more, etc. I think the film really captures that, even before the book was published, Broderick had a sense of what Feynman was going through. He didn't really know how to handle his wife dying. Lastly, I loved how they implement Feynman's love of "drumming". It really didn't become an obsession until much later (when he went to Brazil after Arline's death), but the film shows the beginnings of a love that Feynman would love until his death (a number of his friends joked that he was going to spend his Nobel earnings on a new bongo drum). There were flashes of the Feynman people know and love, but it didn't really hold true at the beginning. One thing that seemed confusing was a brief snipet involving Broderick as Feynman hearing about a "baby". This is most likely in reference to a pregnancy scare that took place when Arline was in the sanatorium. They thought they'd have to abort the baby, but it turned out she was pregnant and that she was just malnourished because of her illness. They didn't explain that very well though. Next they need to make a film about his marriage to Gweneth and his later years winning the Nobel and working on the Challenger. Even though I don't act, I could play Gweneth! hahaha, yeah right.

What a nice movie! If you do not know who Richard Feynman was, then this is a great way to be introduced. He was a brilliant, eccentric, witty scientist who came of age during the 1930s and 1940s. This movie doesn't show his entire life, just the parts that lead up to his involvement with the atomic bomb and the Manhattan Project during WWII. It's based on his books called 'What Do You Care What Other People Think?' and 'Surely You're Joking. Mr. Feynman!' The Movie doesn't deal with his actual scientific work so much as his unconventional approach to it. It also deals with his first marriage to Arline, who was very ill with systemic tuberculosis. The movie takes you from his childhood and university years to his marriage and time at the famous Los Alamos Lab. I think I liked this movie because it doesn't come out and tell you what to think, it just shows snippets of his life and how he overcomes the sad times with humor and grace. I can't say enough about this film. It's that good.