INFINITY
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
(First Look) Starring: Matthew Broderick, Patricia Arquette, Peter Reigert. Screenplay: Patricia Broderick. Producers: Matthew Broderick, Patricia Broderick, Joel Soisson, Michael Leahy. Director: Matthew Broderick. Running Time: 119 minutes. MPAA Rating: PG (adult themes) Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Here I offer a bit of free, friendly advice for film-makers: if you are going to make a two hour long film, please don't make it feel like a four hour long film...and for heaven's sake, don't title it INFINITY. You just can't feed a critic a straight line like that; I'm only human, and it's too easy. INFINITY is a Moebius strip of a movie experience, a film which goes on and on and on without a single compelling situation or character to hold your attention. Under the rookie direction of Matthew Broderick, INFINITY inspires an almost suffocating boredom and the question of why he even bothered to hire an editor.
Broderick also stars in this fact-based story as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, who is a brilliant young student in Queens, NY when the main plot begins in 1934. He meets Arline Greenbaum (Patricia Arquette) at a high school party, and the pair soon become inseparable. Their romance continues while Richard attends college, but an even greater impediment than distance soon arises. Arline is stricken with an illness which eventually is diagnosed as tuberculosis, at the time an incurable and contagious disease. Despite the grave circumstances and against the wishes of family, Richard and Arline marry in 1941. That is also when Richard is recruited to join a top-secret program in Los Alamos, New Mexico as part of the team handed the task of developing the atomic bomb.
On one level, INFINITY is a difficult film to hate actively, because it clearly was made with some care. The film is lovingly photographed by Toyomichi Kurita and scored by Bruce Broughton, and its period detail is meticulously re-created by production designer Bernt Capra. That makes INFINITY a nice film to look at, at least for a little while, until it becomes apparent that there is not a single thing going on worth caring about.
The crushing flaw of INFINITY is that it is almost entirely about the romance between Richard and Arline, and not once does a spark fly between Broderick and Arquette. The script (by Broderick's mother Patricia) focuses on the intellectual nature of their relationship without paying much attention to developing them as individuals, resulting in characters constructed mostly of thick Queens accents and episodic eccentricity. Arquette is more successful at giving Arline some small measure of appeal, but she is unable to make this love affair matter. With no other character in the film provided even a glimmer of a personality, INFINITY rapidly begins to sink under the weight of a painfully dull central relationship.
It is not Broderick's fault that the real-life circumstances of this story have Arline dying for nearly four years, but it is definitely his fault that I was placed in the ghoulish position of hoping she would just get it over with and die already. For nearly ninety minutes Arline is alternately sick and well, and over the course of that ninety minutes we move abstractly between Richard's personal and professional life, with scene after scene inspiring me to throw up my hands in exasperation at the utter lack of a point. I counted ten scenes in INFINITY which literally served no narrative or dramatic purpose, and countless other instances where the judicious use of a knife on several hundred frames of film might have made me less eager to use one on my own throat.
Much is made of Richard's unwavering rationalism, as when he reads to Arline from a medical book detailing what her condition might be while her doctors insist on protecting her, and I suppose the intention is to convey the unique nature of their love. What it really does, however, is make for a love story without a drop of emotion until Broderick breaks down in the film's last scene. At that point, I was sort of feeling like crying myself, mourning two hours of my life which had begun to feel like infinity.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Moebius trips: 3.
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