INFINITY (59)

Directed by: Matthew Broderick

Starring: Matthew Broderick, Patricia Arquette, Peter Riegert

The Pitch: From the life of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynmann, focusing on his work at Los Alamos and his tragically short-lived first marriage.

Theo Sez: Anyone who's read Richard Feynmann's autobiographical books - his motto being, as per the title of the second tome, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" - will remember a larger-than-life extrovert and mild eccentric. The mildness is still there in this likeable movie but the rest is largely gone, due partly to Broderick the actor's milquetoast persona in the central role and partly to Broderick the director's placid, unadventurous style : many of the scenes feel so generic you may well find yourself (as I did) mentally switching off halfway through, then having to rewind to make sure you didn't miss anything important. Yet it's one of those films that succeed despite themselves : clearly a labour of love (produced independently, with Broderick directing from his mother's script), it's a film that understands its subject's joyous love for science and shares his (unspoken) belief that finding out about the world around us - even, and especially, in off-the-cuff experiments like testing for sense of smell by sniffing around on all fours like a bloodhound - is the noblest and most valuable human endeavour. Something wistful, unbelaboured and rather magical twinkles into life occasionally among its fairly undistinguished trappings, the kind of feeling you might get - fleetingly - looking up at the stars on a warm summer's night. It's an almost boring movie that turns, unexpectedly, into an almost heartbreaking one.