"Personal Note: When I was a kid my mother told me not to
stare into the sun, so when I was six, I did. The doctor's didn't know if
my eyes would ever heal. I was scared, alone in that darkness, but slowly,
light began to creep through the bandages. But something in me changed
that day. That day I had my first headache."
Thus begins Darren Aronofsky's 1998 independent trek into the surreal
Pi, an incredibly complex and ambiguous film filled with both
incredible style and substance. To get an idea of the director in case you
have never seen him before, imagine the cinematography originality of Jim
Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise mixed with the perfect dialogue
of Kevin Smith's Clerks
and the bizarre and cryptic storyline of David Lynch's
Eraserhead. Any surprise that all three of the aforementioned films
are black and white? It shouldn't be. Pi uses an 8mm for the
majority of its duration and film in a grainy black and white, giving the
impression that you are watching a nightmare.
The first large challenge of reviewing this thoroughly intriguing movie
is describing its plot. Max Cohen (Sean Guilette) is a brilliant number
theorist. He has three assumptions about the universe, one of which is
that all things have an underlying pattern, an order. The hypothesis that
he creates out of this is that he can predict anything, given enough
variables and knowing the underlying pattern. His place to test this
hypothesis: the stock market. In his search for answers in the stock
market, he discovers a 216-digit number that seems to be the key to it
all: it predicts Black Monday. Jewish mystics (Ben Shenkman) believe it to
be the real name of God. Market manipulators (Pamela Hart) believe it to
be the key to a fortune. A brilliant mathematician (Sol (Mark Margolis))
believes it to be a bug caused when a computer becomes conscious in the
instants before it dies. Max is quickly launched into a world so paranoid
it makes the Orwellian works of Andrew Niccol look safe.
Max is also plagued by headaches. These headaches, strong enough to
force him unconscious at regular intervals, have him taking a cocktail of
painkillers in order to subdue. As he creeps closer and closer to the
answer, the headaches increase in their intensity.
I think the best way to interpret this massively cryptic film would be
as a single man's search for peace. Through the movie, Max is gripped by a
violent obsession with numbers and a complete phobia of social
interaction. He constantly shuns the advances of his neighbor Devi (Samai
Shoaib). He finds himself unable to take a break from anything and, as a
consequence, finds himself inside of a complete nightmare. The only way to
get away from this nightmare is to give up the one thing that has been his
lifelong passion: numbers. The suspense of the film is helped along with
an electric score by Clint Mansell, a soundtrack that keeps you on the
edge with its razor-sharp notes. Also helping is the cinematographer
Matthew Libatique, who gives us an infectious feeling of paranoia with the
black and white film and the constant use of an unsteady camera to show
the fast movement of Max.
The film, although making numerous references to number theory, is
fairly easy to understand with no mathematical knowledge: not to say that
it doesn't help to know how to add and subtract. What is difficult is to
view this film without a mind seeking to be intrigued, because, if you
don't want intrigue, you shouldn't be watching Pi.
Also known as p and Pi: Faith in
Chaos.
From filmcritic.com