'Adventures of a Mathematician': Film Review | Palm Springs 2020 | Movies - Hollywood Reporter

This European production tells an unknown true story about a Polish-born mathematician who joined the Manhattan Project at the end of World War II by Stephen Farber, film critic for The Hollywood Reporter.

Photo: Palm Springs Film Festival

A film that touches on immigration as well as the dangers of nuclear weapons certainly sounds timely. Adventures of a Mathematician, a European production having its world premiere in Palm Springs, only partly delivers on its promise. Writer-director Thor Klein retrieves an unknown story about one of the key players involved in the Manhattan Project near the end of World War II. The film lacks the excitement to make a splash in a crowded marketplace, but it achieves many haunting moments.

Klein is German, and the film is a German-Polish-British co-production, but most of it is in English. The main character, Stan Ulam (Philippe Tlokinski), is a Polish-Jewish mathematician who managed to get a fellowship at Harvard and then was recruited to join the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. According to the film, his knowledge of mathematics and also his sideline as a card shark led him to make important contributions to the construction of a hydrogen bomb and also to the earliest exploration of computer technology.

The film’s main interests, however, are in sociological and moral issues rather than scientific ones, and here is where the film overreaches in trying to handle more ambitious themes than a 102-minute movie can encompass. Stan and his younger brother Adam (Mateusz Wieclawek) have managed to immigrate to America, but they are deeply concerned about the fate of their parents and sister left in Poland.

The Holocaust theme is treated sketchily, but it does help to explain why several of the European-born scientists and mathematicians working at Los Alamos were so intensely motivated to build an atomic bomb that might help to defeat Nazi Germany...

...Mathematician always tantalizes, even if it doesn’t do full justice to the richness of the subject.
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Source: Hollywood Reporter