‘Marguerite’s Theorem’ Review: A Bizarrely By-the-Numbers Fiction About the Gift/Curse of Math Genius
variety.comJessica Kiang It is a paradox worthy of Zeno himself that significant dumbing-down is necessary in order to make tales of extraordinary genius comprehensible to us lay audiences.
But in her own attempt at grandly unifying these opposing poles, French director Anna Novion (“Grown Ups,” “Rendezvous in Kiruna”) splits the difference so often she delivers in “Marguerite’s Theorem,” a movie riddled with cliché that plunges right past comprehensible into painfully, pedantically predictable — even to those of us who stumble when subtracting one two-digit number from another.
Its heroine loves math because through it she can “put order on infinity,” but “Marguerite’s Theorem” is proof as incontrovertible as Andrew Wiles’ 1994 Fermat solution, that one can have too much order.
Marguerite Hoffman (Ella Rumpf, “Raw”) is a tacitly spectrum-coded PhD student at France’s École Normale Supérieure, which is legendary in science circles for churning out geniuses at a rate it might take one of its graduates to compute.
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