Skip to content

Where different views on Israel and Judaism are welcome.

  • Home
  • Subscribe / donate
  • Events calendar
  • News
    • Local
    • National
    • Israel
    • World
    • עניין בחדשות
      A roundup of news in Canada and further afield, in Hebrew.
  • Opinion
    • From the JI
    • Op-Ed
  • Arts & Culture
    • Performing Arts
    • Music
    • Books
    • Visual Arts
    • TV & Film
  • Life
    • Celebrating the Holidays
    • Travel
    • The Daily Snooze
      Cartoons by Jacob Samuel
    • Mystery Photo
      Help the JI and JMABC fill in the gaps in our archives.
  • Community Links
    • Organizations, Etc.
    • Other News Sources & Blogs
    • Business Directory
  • FAQ
  • JI Chai Celebration
  • [email protected]! video
Weinberg Residence Spring 2023 box ad

Search

Archives

"The Basketball Game" is a graphic novel adaptation of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada animated short of the same name – intended for audiences aged 12 years and up. It's a poignant tale of the power of community as a means to rise above hatred and bigotry. In the end, as is recognized by the kids playing the basketball game, we're all in this together.

Recent Posts

  • Settling Ukrainian newcomers
  • A double anniversary
  • Deep, dangerous bias
  • Honouring others in death
  • Living under fire of missiles
  • Laugh for good causes
  • Sizzlin’ Summer in June
  • Parker Art Salon on display
  • Helping animals and people
  • New LGBTQ+ resource guide
  • Innovators in serving the community
  • First Jewish Prom a success
  • Prince George proclaims Jewish Heritage Month
  • Community milestones … Wasserman & Feldman
  • Düsseldorf returns painting
  • קנדה גדלה במיליון איש
  • Garden welcomes visitors
  • Spotting disinformation
  • A family metaphor
  • Hate crimes down a bit
  • First mikvah in B.C. Interior
  • Check out JQT Artisan Market
  • Yiddish alive and well
  • Celebrating 30th year
  • Get ready to laugh it up
  • Supporting Beth Israel’s light
  • Na’amat to gather in Calgary
  • Community artists highlighted
  • KDHS hits all the right notes
  • Giving back to their community
  • The experience of a lifetime
  • Boundaries are a good thing
  • Mental health concerns
  • Food insecurity at UBC affects Jewish students, too
  • Healthy food Harvey won’t eat
  • חודש שלישי ברציפות של הפגנות

Recent Tweets

Tweets by @JewishIndie

Tag: Adventures of a Mathematician

Jewish take on bomb

Jewish take on bomb

Philippe Tlokinski stars in Adventures of a Mathematician. (photo from Samuel Goldwyn Films)

Forgotten your calculus? Simple geometry is more than sufficient to follow the triangular saga of Polish-Jewish brainiac Stanislaw Ulam from the cloistered classrooms of Harvard to Robert Oppenheimer’s atomic-bomb “startup” in dusty New Mexico.

The third point on Ulam’s map is Lvov, Poland, where his parents, sister and niece live in tenuous safety. Until the Nazis blast across the border and blow down the doors of every Jewish home.

Adventures of a Mathematician opens in Cambridge on the eve of the Second World War, where Stan (Philippe Tlokinski) lives with his younger brother Adam. The news trickling out of Poland gets objectively worse, but going back to Europe is out of the question. So Stan Ulam embraces another way of combating the Nazis, proffered by his best friend and fellow emigré scientist, Johnny von Neumann (Fabian Kocieki) – join a bunch of other geniuses on the top-secret Manhattan Project.

Writer-director Thor Klein’s intelligent, efficient script relies on our knowledge of the war and the Holocaust (and countless movies on those subjects) to concisely convey the gravity of the situation and, importantly, avoid the familiar clichés. At the same time, Klein skilfully involves us in Ulam’s personal life – he’s a witty man with an appreciation for gambling odds, who knows a smart woman when he meets her at a party – without trivializing the larger historical events.

Klein’s other great achievement, because of its U.S.-centred subject matter, is making Adventures of a Mathematician, which he shot in Germany and Poland with local crew, European actors and German, Polish and British financing, totally look and feel like an American film. It’s a masterful trick, which requires dedication and skill at every level of the production.

Klein makes his job easier, admittedly, by depicting Ulam as an acclimated, assimilated American rather than a European fish out of water.

Where Adventures of a Mathematician (which takes its title from Ulam’s memoir) veers from traditional Hollywood filmmaking is in the dramatic conflict. It’s not the war, which is always off-screen. Tension enters Ulam’s marriage later in the film, and we care about that relationship, but that’s not the movie’s motor, either.

Instead, Klein has made a film about philosophical and existential dilemmas, internalized in the person of Ulam – a cerebral, introverted man who largely keeps his emotions to himself, even when he is debating technical solutions with his equally stubborn boss, Edward Teller (Joel Basman).

Not many Hollywood executives would back a film whose protagonist is pitched on the horns of another triangle, namely the conflicting pulls of intellectual satisfaction, personal morality and professional ambition. Stanislaw Ulam, action hero, isn’t the easiest sell to North American audiences.

But, once you get hooked by this utterly accessible film and its remarkable central character, you’re in for a rewarding and thought-provoking experience.

A likable character for much of the film, Ulam becomes more solitary as his doubts grow about devising and building a weapon of mass destruction – especially after the Nazis are defeated.

Tlokinski’s performance, which does incorporate a ridiculous (by modern measures) amount of cigarette smoking, is never less than compelling.

Adventures of a Mathematician trusts the audience enough to omit most of the melodramatic conversations and passages endemic to a Second World War-era scenario. I’m thinking specifically of Ulam’s survivor’s guilt, which is palpable without him needing a speech or a scene to convey it.

A 2020 film whose release was delayed by the pandemic and limited to a handful of festival appearances (including the Toronto and New York Jewish film festivals), Adventures of a Mathematician solves for x with nary a misstep. It can be rented via Apple TV, and possibly other platforms.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Format ImagePosted on October 8, 2021October 6, 2021Author Michael FoxCategories TV & FilmTags Adventures of a Mathematician, atomic bomb, Holocaust, Manhattan Project, Philippe Tlokinski, Stanislaw Ulam, Thor Klein
Proudly powered by WordPress