Adventures of a Mathematician: The Birth of the Bomb and the Sum of All Fears
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-minus
Based on a 1976 memoir by Stanislaw Ulam - one of the Los Alamos Manhattan Project international scientific dream team - Adventures of a Mathematician offers chilly reminders of the birth of weapons of mass annihilation during WWII.
German writer-director Thor Klein shot this American-set feature about Ulam, one of numerous European Jews on the project who raced to beat Germany to the creation of the first nuclear bomb.
Though decently acted and with convincing production values, the film only partly succeeds in turning Ulam’s eventful biography into an effective drama. The story begins in 1940 on the Harvard campus where the Polish-Jewish Ulam, then 31, was teaching. He had fled Poland the previous year, along with his teen-aged brother Adam (Mateusz Wieclawek), leaving his sister, Stephanie and parents back in Lvov, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine).
Philippe Tlokinski plays Slanislaw Ulam, whose work made both the A Bomb and the H Bomb possible.
A chain-smoking, light-hearted eccentric, Ullam (Philippe Tlokinski) likes teaching math to undergraduates with card tricks. When he meets his future wife Francoise (Esther Garrel, of Call Me by Your Name) an aspiring writer at risk of being deported back to France, he proposes a marriage of convenience that turns into a love affair.
When Ulam’s friend, the Hungarian physicist John von Neumann (Fabian Kociecki) offers him a chance to help the war effort in a top-secret project, Ullam and his Francoise head off to New Mexico, leaving Adam in school in Rhode Island
Soon, the couple set up home in one of the cheap pre-fab houses on the site, taking time out for drinks and dancing with the other scientists and their families, while, in the labs and board rooms, egos clash and breakthroughs are made.
But with the surrender of Germany in May, 1945, some scientists raise questions of the project’s purpose and are appalled at the bombings of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Stanislaw, or “Stan” as he is known in America, is doubtful about going ahead with the hydrogen bomb and “living the rest of our lives with a gun to our heads.”
His main adversary is the habitually uncongenial Hungarian-American physicist, Edward Teller (Joel Basman) though eventually they learn to work together.
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First, Ulam undergoes an attack of encephalitis (shown in the film as coinciding with the news of his family’s death in Poland), and subsequent brain surgery. The medical event, according to Ullam’s friend, the philosopher and mathematician, Gian-Carlo Rota, caused a personality change.
Ulam became more brilliantly creative than ever, but was unable to deal with details (though the film only hints at the extent of that transformation).
In one hospital scene, we see Ulam unable to answer a simple multiplication problem (“I’m a mathematician, not a computer.”) In another scene, apparently historically accurate, he’s playing solitaire as part of his rehabilitation when he envisions the method of statistical prediction for which he is most famous, known as the “Monte Carlo” method.
Taking the advice of his wife and “Johnny” von Neumann, he returns to Los Alamos. There, he collaborates with Teller on solving the problem of initiating fusion in the hydrogen bomb, the “Ulam-Teller design,” — the details of which you needn’t feel obliged to understand because they are known only to the top military of nations with nuclear arsenals.
Having covered Ullam’s career high points, writer-director Klein seems unable to find a way to show how biographical events translate as life lessons. So, he provides what amounts two endings.
In one, Ullam makes a farewell visit to his dying friend, Von Newuman in hospital, a victim of cancer, possibly caused by radiation. They talk, scientist to scientist, about the emerging science of DNA.
Subsequently, he goes to see his brother, Adam, who is undergoing a mental-health crisis. Adam says he is renouncing Judaism and attacks Stanislaw for abandoning him to go make bombs.
Stanislaw asks for forgiveness and attempts to justify his work at trying to win the war in the best way he could. Curiously, no mention is made of Adam Ullam’s long career at Harvard as a renowned Soviet specialist who taught Henry Kissinger and Robert F. Kennedy.
As to the portrayed schism between the siblings, there’s this detail from The Washington Post’s 2000 obituary of Adam Ulam:
“Despite a 13-year age difference between the two brothers, they maintained an exceptionally close relationship until Stanislaw’s death in 1984.”
Adventures of a Mathematician. Written and directed by Thor Klein. Starring: Philippe Tlokinski, Esther Garrel, Fabian Kociecki, Joel Basman and Mateusz Wieclawek. Adventures of a Mathematician is available on VOD on Oct. 1.