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'Infinity': Adds Up

Matthew Broderick is a significant presence in front of and behind the camera in "Infinity." This doubling effect—as lead actor and producer-director—gives us an edifying sense of Broderick and his subject. That would be Richard Feynman, the theoretical physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965. In this film, freely adapted from two chapters in Feynman’s books, "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?," Broderick’s disarming personality puts an appealing spin on Feynman as a wide-eyed innocent who’s always closing in on major discoveries, but is still prone to very human mistakes.

The film is about the emotional and intellectual growth of Feynman. It starts with the precocious 6-year-old (played by Jeffrey Force) asking his father (Peter Riegert) questions about inertia and concludes with the young adult (Broderick) helping to create the atomic bomb while commuting 100 miles to the bedside of his ailing wife, Arline (Patricia Arquette).

In between, we see the development of a great scientific mind as it also comes to grips with life’s crueler mysteries: the dawning of the nuclear age and the physical disintegration of his truest love. Feynman’s sweetheart since childhood, Arline is suffering from an illness that doctors seem to have a problem diagnosing. Researching her symptoms in medical texts, Feynman (whose investigation seems almost inhumanly scientific in its emotion-free perseverance) believes she may have Hodgkin’s disease.

When he learns he has a well-paying job with the government in New Mexico (working as a relatively low-level player in the Manhattan Project), Feynman marries Arline. He sets her up in a hospital in Albuquerque, visiting her on weekends. This is the movie’s final section, which interweaves the progression of her illness with the building of the bomb. And it’s right here, surprisingly, that the movie loses something.

Scriptwriter Patricia Broderick, Matthew’s mother, writes in a dry, unemotional manner which only tacitly deals with the essential. This dry, exacting style seems right—the straightforward, innocently curious mien , one assumes, of Feynman himself. But at the same time, "Infinity" becomes so understated, it succumbs to flatness.

There are too many sweetly stirring moments to write the film off, though. In one scene, a somewhat embellished version of the physicist’s real experience, the young Feynman challenges a Chinese shopkeeper to a mathematical calculation competition. The shopkeeper uses his abacus, while Feynman figures out the problems with pen and paper. The old man wins the first few rounds, but Feynman is close behind. Now caught in the excitement, the shopkeeper yells, in broken English: "Cube root! Go!" The movie shines most during moments like this, when the wonderment of science and the possibilities of the human mind come together with entertaining fluidity.

INFINITY (PG) — Contains tastefully handled sexual situations.