PiThe difference between searching for meaning in life and courting madness is sometimes a fine line. Pi is a psychological thriller about a paranoid mathematician named Max Cohen (Sean Gullette), who obsessively searches for trends in numbers, looking for a correlation to predict the rise and fall of the stock market. After his computer--which he has named "Euclid"--fries after spewing out a two-hundred and sixteen-digit number, Max becomes increasingly obsessed with it and its larger significance. Shortly thereafter, Max is requisitioned to use his skills to unraveling the numerological patterns of the Torah, and becomes convinced that his number is the true name of God.
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Max is fixated on numbers, and goes from day to day caught in an unrelenting sequence of automatic actions. Each voice-over begins with the time of day and chronicles the "results" of his life as a kind of living experiment. He performs actions like they were programmed responses--like he were a living computer, which explains his ease at addressing his computer by name. Conversely, he shuts out almost all other actual human contact, including the playful flirting by his neighbor, Devi (Samia Shoaib), or the persistent efforts of Lenny Meyer (Ben Shenkman) to chat with him at the diner. The exception to this is the company Max keeps with his one-time mathematics teacher, Sol Robeson (Mark Margolis). They play matches of Go, and it is implied that Max always loses due to overthinking his moves at the expense of his intuition. Max only maintains this one vestigial link to humanity in service to his greater "mission": to find the myriad patterns of the universe in numbers. Sol hopes to exorcise Max of these arithmetical demons by sharing stories meant to caution him about how his obsession is actually counter-productive, using a parable about Archimedes taking a bath to help him see life from a new perspective. Max stubbornly refuses any external guidance, and continues on his downward spiral into madness. It is no coincidence that Pi is shot in black and white, since Max's worldview is unflinchingly logic-driven. His unrelenting pursuit of a higher purpose is as arbitrary as the numbers he researches, and offers him no comfort. Max hallucinates during his commute on the subway, seeing vivid and grotesque images like disembodied brains throbbing on the station steps. He often narrates that when he was young, his mother told him not to stare into the sun, but he did it anyway. He began to have terrible headaches afterward, and was subsequently "gifted" with a savant-like understanding of numbers, a talent which he uses like a parlor trick with a little girl in his apartment building named Jenna (Kristyn Mae-Anne Lao). Max's fixation on numbers is suggested to be some form of communion with God, who has made him the "messenger" of the sacred words that make up Kabbalah rituals. Lenny repeatedly shares numerological associations found in Hebrew with Max, and Max should be more enthusiastic at this revelation (or at least find common ground with a fellow numerologist). But Max's mastery over numbers is more of a curse than a blessing. He is stricken with bouts of intense pain, forcing him to take increasingly larger doses of assorted drugs to stifle it. Invariably, he winds up regaining consciousness on the tiles of his bathroom floor, with his nose dripping blood, as though whatever force is at work in his brain is too much for mere flesh to handle. Rituals are a persistent theme in Pi; Max's life is one elaborate ritual of archiving his thoughts and repeating them over and over, like the rituals Lenny and his fellow Kabbalah practitioners perform as they pursue the advent of the messianic age.
Pi was director Darren Aronofsky's first feature film, and its paranoid, psychologically complex themes speak to the similarities between his films and those of Roman Polanski. Like Polanski's Knife in the Water, the black and white film is filled with frequent close--even invasive--shots of Max and his claustrophobic environment removed from the rest of civilization. Pi also recalls Tetsuo: The Iron Man, an experimental horror film by Shinya Tsukamoto, with its grainy yet sharply contrasted imagery and its electronic and industrial rock-inspired musical score. Both films feature the synthesis of flesh and machine as metaphors for the pursuit of knowledge at the expense of humanity. Max's apartment is draped in computer wires, resembling veins and arteries; and comparisons between computers and flesh suggests that Aronofsky was also inspired David Cronenberg's films, especially Videodrome. (The grainy aesthetic and pounding music invites comparisons between Pi and the music videos by industrial rock band, Nine Inch Nails; Max even looks a bit like Trent Reznor.) Max hides away in his apartment--another trope of Polanski's movies, like Repulsion--where he has shut out any external interference; even the blinds are perpetually drawn to keep light out. (This is ironic, considering the implied source of his "powers" came from his overexposure to the sun.) People Max interacts with--like the overly aggressive Wall Street broker, Marcy Dawson (Pamela Hart)--come across as threatening by default, since the film's depiction of New York City comes from Max's frenzied and anxiety-ridden perspective. The pervading question in Pi is whether everyone--even Lenny--is actually out to get him because of his forbidden knowledge of the mysterious numbers, or whether this is just a complex fantasy born from his delirium-saturated mind. Ants frequently show up and invade his hermetically-sealed workspace, and one seems to be the reason that Euclid crashed at a critical moment. Max initially resents the ants as invaders, but comes to identify with them; one scene suggests that the ants are messengers of God, carrying mathematical dictums from on high through the stock ticker above his computer. The motif of ants is emblematic of Max's automatic and soulless routines, depriving him of agency over his own life. The increasingly self-destructive acts he performs on himself represents his desire to escape his psychological prison and to reach some kind of conclusion to his quest. The title of the film becomes ironic because the symbolic number has no end, and has remained one of the most enigmatic puzzles for number theorists. The Greek letter is an arbitrary symbol that only means what people impose upon it, like Max's endless search for meaning in life and in himself, where there is no conclusion--just the infinite.
Recommended for: Fans of a raw, paranoia-driven psychological thriller with an almost obsessive focus on numerology. Pi wears its inspirations on its sleeves, drawing immediate comparisons with other first feature films from cinematic auteurs, including David Lynch's Eraserhead.
Pi was director Darren Aronofsky's first feature film, and its paranoid, psychologically complex themes speak to the similarities between his films and those of Roman Polanski. Like Polanski's Knife in the Water, the black and white film is filled with frequent close--even invasive--shots of Max and his claustrophobic environment removed from the rest of civilization. Pi also recalls Tetsuo: The Iron Man, an experimental horror film by Shinya Tsukamoto, with its grainy yet sharply contrasted imagery and its electronic and industrial rock-inspired musical score. Both films feature the synthesis of flesh and machine as metaphors for the pursuit of knowledge at the expense of humanity. Max's apartment is draped in computer wires, resembling veins and arteries; and comparisons between computers and flesh suggests that Aronofsky was also inspired David Cronenberg's films, especially Videodrome. (The grainy aesthetic and pounding music invites comparisons between Pi and the music videos by industrial rock band, Nine Inch Nails; Max even looks a bit like Trent Reznor.) Max hides away in his apartment--another trope of Polanski's movies, like Repulsion--where he has shut out any external interference; even the blinds are perpetually drawn to keep light out. (This is ironic, considering the implied source of his "powers" came from his overexposure to the sun.) People Max interacts with--like the overly aggressive Wall Street broker, Marcy Dawson (Pamela Hart)--come across as threatening by default, since the film's depiction of New York City comes from Max's frenzied and anxiety-ridden perspective. The pervading question in Pi is whether everyone--even Lenny--is actually out to get him because of his forbidden knowledge of the mysterious numbers, or whether this is just a complex fantasy born from his delirium-saturated mind. Ants frequently show up and invade his hermetically-sealed workspace, and one seems to be the reason that Euclid crashed at a critical moment. Max initially resents the ants as invaders, but comes to identify with them; one scene suggests that the ants are messengers of God, carrying mathematical dictums from on high through the stock ticker above his computer. The motif of ants is emblematic of Max's automatic and soulless routines, depriving him of agency over his own life. The increasingly self-destructive acts he performs on himself represents his desire to escape his psychological prison and to reach some kind of conclusion to his quest. The title of the film becomes ironic because the symbolic number has no end, and has remained one of the most enigmatic puzzles for number theorists. The Greek letter is an arbitrary symbol that only means what people impose upon it, like Max's endless search for meaning in life and in himself, where there is no conclusion--just the infinite.
Recommended for: Fans of a raw, paranoia-driven psychological thriller with an almost obsessive focus on numerology. Pi wears its inspirations on its sleeves, drawing immediate comparisons with other first feature films from cinematic auteurs, including David Lynch's Eraserhead.