This was a recommendation I read on Marginal Revolution. Tyler Cowen, oddly enough, praised it for its depiction of modern Taipei. After reading its synopsis however I became a bit apprehensive: stories about geniuses who suffer from a mental ailment of some sort as a side effect of their talent is well-trodden territory and risk conforming to a standard formula.  X + Y (known in the US as A Brillliant Young Mind) might be doubly prone to these tropes as its protagonist is a teenager.

Nathan Ellis is a boy whose parents recognize from an early age that he has an innate talent for mathematics. He is also autistic. He finds it nearly impossible to form any emotional connections with other people, often taking everything that he is told literally and has a host of odd foibles, such as becoming extremely agitated if he is given pieces of food that sum to a non-prime number. His father seems to the only person who he can talk to but when he passes away in a car accident, Nathan becomes even more withdrawn. Fortunately his school is able to find a personal mentor for him, Martin Humphreys, who was once a member of the British team for the International Mathematical Olympiad. Humphreys has ailments and troubles of his own but he agrees to train Nathan until he is ready for his own participation in the IMO.

So far, so standard you might think but X + Y does a lot of things that makes me sympathetic to it. For one thing, unlike so many other films, Nathan isn’t portrayed as being superhuman. He may be smart, but his mentor still needs to teach him over the course of seven years before he is remotely ready for the IMO. He is subjected to the usual snubbing at school due to his total lack of social skills but the film doesn’t dwell on this. But it is when he is sent to a two-week math camp in Taipei, with the British team being assigned to partner with the Chinese team, considered the best in the world, that the film really takes off. All of a sudden amongst a peer group composed entirely of fellow geniuses, Nathan who had always been considered as the weird one is just normal while his immense talent merely places him at the average level. Its a novel experience for Nathan and a fascinating one to watch for the audience.

Unfortunately the film has its weak parts as well. Nathan burgeoning friendship and eventual romance with Zhang Mei, a female member of the Chinese team, may well be a real crowd-pleaser. It’s admittedly very enjoyable to witness his mother’s bemused expression when she realizes that her son has finally found a female friend that he finds worthy of his attention. But it’s too cutesy and too pat to be worthy of a serious film. A much more interesting character is Luke, another member of the British team, whose autism makes him even weirder than Nathan and he tries, and fails, hard to fit in. Even worse is that he turns out to not be quite talented enough. As he confesses to Nathan, it’s acceptable to be weird if you’re clever enough to make up for it but what happens if you’re not?

On the whole, I found X + Y to be a very entertaining watch and Morgan Matthews to be a competent director. It does offer enough of a twist to the biopic of a genius formula to make it worthwhile but this is still very much a mainstream film with a final act that turns it almost into a love story. I did appreciate that it makes no attempt to claim that it’s a true story even though it is very loosely based on a real person who was featured in an earlier documentary.