Pi
A BRILLIANT MATHEMATICIAN TEETERS ON THE BRINK OF INSANITY AS HESEARCHES FOR AN ELUSIVE NUMERICAL CODE IN THIS CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED SCHIZOPHRENIC THRILLER. SPECIAL FEATURES: COMMENTARYBY DIRECTOR DARREN ARONOFSKY AND ACTOR SEAN GULLETTE, DELETED SCENES, INTERACTIVE MENUS, PRODUCTION NOTES AND MUCH MORE.Patterns exist everywhere: in nature, in science, in religion, in business. Max Cohen (played hauntingly by Sean Gullette) is a mathematician searching for these patterns in everything. Yet, he’s not the only one, and everyone from Wall Street investors, looking to break the market, to Hasidic Jews, searching for the 216-digit number that reveals the true name of God, are trying to get their hands on Max. This dark, low-budget film was shot in black and white by director Darren Aronofsky. With eerie music, voice-overs, and overt symbolism enhancing the somber mood, Aronofsky has created a disturbing look at the world. Max is deeply paranoid, holed up in his apartment with his computer Euclid, obsessively studying chaos theory. Blinding headaches and hallucinogenic visions only feed his paranoia as he attempts to remain aloof from the world, venturing out only to meet his mentor, Sol Robeson (Mark Margolis), who for some mysterious reason feels Max should take a break from his research. This movie is complex–occasionally too complex–but the psychological drama and the loose sci-fi elements make this a worthwhile, albeit consuming, watch. Pi won the Director’s Award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. –Jenny Brown
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(out of 477 reviews)
Review by Marc Ruby™ for Pi
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It is a remarkable surprise that, in a time of science fiction and fantasy films which continually strive do outdo each other in pyrotechnics, one of the best science fiction films I’ve seen is a little black & white masterpiece that was shot with a $60,000 budget. Darren Aronofsky, writer and director of ‘PI’, has created a film that is every bit as engaging as its ‘big’ brothers – in reality, even more so.Mathematician Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) is on a quest. He is convinced that underlying the chaos of the stock market is a pristine order, a mathematical rule with which he can prove that everything can be reduced to numbers. His mentor and teacher is Sol Robeson (Mark Margolis), who was forced to give up his own investigations into PI when he suffered a mysterious stroke. Cohen’s investigation takes him far beyond the gyrations of the stock market into the mystical Kaballah and an intense questioning of the basic nature of reality. His tool for this journey is the silent, inanimate computer, Euclid, who seems to deconstruct Cohen’s universe further with each strike of the return key. Even when Robeson urges Cohen to take a break from a quest which is clearly destroying the mathematician, torturing him with horrific headaches and hallucinations, Max is unable to stop. He is drawn step by step into the irrevocable gap between the sacred and the mundane.Made with reversal film which heightens the contrast between light and dark, the film provides a continuous flow of symbolic content which plays in harmony with the world of ideas from with it is drawn. Ants and electric drills, computer chips and the swirls of cream in a cup of coffee all seem to have otherworldly referents. Aronofsky and Gullette, by some strange archaic alchemy have managed to create the seeming of layer after layer of possible meaning. To me the film itself becomes a non-repeating pattern where chaos mimics reality.This film satisfies on many levels, starting with a question, finding an answer, and then discovering the next question. It is visually brilliant. Film director Matthew Libatique proves himself a genius, and Matthew Maraffi’s production design is amazing. Euclid is created out of scrap and loose parts, but manages to take on a full life of its own. The acting is simply perfect. This is a film for late night coffee house conversations, appealing to both the paranoid and the believer.Notable additional contents of the DVD are two full length commentaries on the film one by Aronofsky and the other by Gullette. There is a section of outtakes, the film trailers and some other miscellany. Much recommended.
Review by Phrodoe for Pi
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Pi is one of the better independent low-budget films I’ve seen in the last couple of years. It’s a strange, twisted, subversive film, which takes as its thesis the idea that it’s possible to know too much, to ask too many questions, for one’s own good. A good example is the troubled protagonist of Pi, played to chilling perfection by Sean Gullette, who struggles with both the outside world and himself in his quest for the ultimate knowledge — an equation which will tie together everything, from the beginnings of the universe to the chaotic ups and downs of the stock market. He is spied upon by unnamed big business interests, hoping to cash in on the latter idea; he is spied upon by Hasidic Jews who hope to cash in on the former idea; both sets of spies add the perfect element of paranoia to the film, and convince you that there is far more going on here than meets the eye, far more going on than is being talked about. The ideas put forth in later scenes bear this out — boy, do they! — but I wouldn’t want to spoil that for you. The events of Pi, especially in the later scenes, are so surprising that any discussion of the plot would be totally unfair — like telling someone who hasn’t seen Citizen Kane what Rosebud is. So instead I’ll confine myself to theme and character, which are sort of intertwined in this film. Gullette’s character is a genius mathematician (as you might expect), a child prodigy of sorts who has always, we are told by his narration, courted such dangerous ideas and notions…and has paid the price for his arrogance more than once. He suffers from migranes — really serious, agonizing ones which give him nosebleeds and vicious hallucinations, and which no painkillers seem able to stop or tame. (In fact the depictions of the migranes are amongst the film’s best sequences; I watched it with a friend of mine who suffers from such headaches, and he said that these scenes were pretty close to what he experienced, at least in the feeling those scenes evoked.) It is during or just after the onset of these migranes that Gullette’s character seems to receive his greatest revelations and insights — and here the filmmakers use a technique of showing bright light as the literal image of these insights, a bit of symbolism that is almost, but not quite, clumsy and overdone. I believe it’s by their sheer conviction that it works that the filmmakers are able to pull it off at all. In fact, it’s through the use of this symbolism (light=knowledge) that Pi does some of its best work. It’s used to illustrate the thesis I mentioned earlier, that it’s possible to want to know too much for one’s own good; Gullette’s character relates how as a child, he stared too long into the sun, possibly triggering his migranes and his gift for numbers at the same time…which is why both seem intertwined in his perceptions. The use of light in the migrane sequences, and Gullette’s subsequent gifts of insight, not only are symbolic but provide foreshadowing — is he staring into the sun again? If so, what damage will he do this time? And as the plot slowly reveals where it is going, those questions become not only more difficult to answer, but more unsettling to even ask. Pi was shot in black and white, which I find entirely appropriate. The harsh images created by the cinematography are a perfect echo for the harsh story, spoken in a language of such harsh rhythms…like the song a puppet sings when it siezes the strings of its own puppeteer. It may take more than one viewing to get everything out of this film, because there’s a lot packed into it…but the more you watch it, the more rewarding it is. I would heartily reccommend Pi to any lover of experimental film.
Review by Mike Stone for Pi
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“Pi” is a tough film to pin down. Some people go in looking for a complex dissertation on number theory, an explanation of the magic code that will explain the universe, and the true name of God. I think this tact is a mistake. Sure, all of these elements and questions are here, but they’re not meant to be taken seriously. Director/writer Darren Aronofsky and writer/star Sean Gullette have distracted their audience with a nifty little McGuffin (Hitchcock’s term for a device or plot element that drives the movie forward, but is inconsequential enough to be discarded after it’s done its job). The movie is not about the 216-digit number that Max accidentally stumbles across, and is nearly killed for. What we’re really watching is a portrayal of obsession. What happens when one man puts on his blinders, plunges forth into the abyss, and nearly destroys himself in the process?I’m not going to tell you what happens, but I will tell you this: it ain’t pretty. Much of the stuff here is pretty gruesome. Gullette looks every bit the tortured math genius: wild hair, constant 5 o’clock shadow, empty eyes, hunched posture, pale skin, bony fingers. He begins the film as a tortured loner, and proceeds to descend from there into a state of self-imposed madness. It is gradual, but palpable. Gullette does a fine job detailing Max, showing his angst and torment quite clearly. I would have liked, however, if he gave Max some humanity by also giving him some humour. Thankfully there is some humour injected into this otherwise dark tale in other places. Max is repeatedly confronted by what can only be described as a hip-hop Kabalist. The character of Lenny Meyer adds some much-needed levity to the film. He torments Max in coffee shops and on the street with his motormouth ramblings about how number theory intersects with the Kaballah. Max, for his part, looks on with bemused frustration, further portraying his difficulty when dealing with actual people.Aronofsky, who is a proficient visual stylist, gets his first chance to shine here. Techniques that he would later expand and abuse in the engrossing but ponderous “Requiem for a Dream” make their first appearances in this lower budget effort. One particularly stylish device uses manic quick cuts to portray the rhythm and the ritual of Max taking his headache medicine. It was overbearing when used in “Requiem”, but fits in nicely here. It is repeated over and over, a technique Aronofsky also likes to employ with his dialogue. There is one story that opens the film, about how when Max was a little boy he forced himself to stare into the sun, which pops up from time to time. We don’t understand the implications of this story right away (apparently it is the cause of Max’s migraines), but after hearing it several times, and living with Max in his own personal hell, it becomes more potent.I usually not go for movies that double as surrealistic mood pieces, and judging from the other reviews here I wouldn’t enjoy David Lynch’s “Eraserhead”. But “Pi” has a couple of my favourite cinema motifs: obsession, loneliness, and genius. Throw in a healthy dose of mathematical theory (but not too much) and the remnants of a thriller plot and you’ve got a movie that dares to engage both your mind and your senses.[*Shakespeare's "Henry VIII", 1.1.62-3]
Review by Paul A. Stermer for Pi
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Being a genius can give you nasty headaches.That simple notion, at the heart of Darren Aronofsky’s “Pi,” defies the complexity of this brilliant little indie thriller. Sean Gullette plays Max Cohen, a mathematics/electronics savant who believes that matter, the world around us – indeed, our very existence – has a pattern to it that can be expressed as a number. Max devotes his life to finding this mysterious 216-digit number.This has two results. First, Max acts weird. He’s paranoid, reclusive, disturbed and vigorously anti-social.Second, he’s pursued by people (presumably those who have more friends and fewer headaches) who might profit from the number: both Hasidic Jews, who think it’s the code to the Torah and signals the coming of the messianic age, and Wall Street fat cats.Is “Pi” profound or just odd? It’s some of both, I suppose, but make no mistake: The film is visually stunning, and has a lot to say about the burden of genius, the quest for knowledge – and maybe even about the existence of God. Betcha can’t say that about the latest from Adam Sandler.Health warning: “Pi” has a throbbing score and is filled with grainy, flickering images. A quick finger on the fast-forward button can help viewers avoid Max-like headaches.
Review by Neil Ford for Pi
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Notes for the bewildered:
1. Pi is NOT about the number pi (I’m not sure some of these reviewers even watched the film);
2. Accusations that the film is more about numerology than mathematics miss the point by a mile, i.e. there is a vital scene in which the main character is plainly warned that his obsessive pattern search will lead him into the non-science desert of numerology;
3. Max’s search for the 216 digit name of God is not a simple descent into mystical hooey: his investigation of the Torah, like the stock market, is a search for an underlying pattern in a chaotic system. He is intrigued by the possibility of arriving at a fundamental insight into the universe by this discovery. Ultimately his fallacy is not the assumption that this pattern exists, but his presumption that his brain could encompass the entire world.Enough philosophy – the black and white photography is stark and unsettling, the minor characters are memorable (Lenny and Sol are standouts), the soundtrack is refreshingly modern and engaging without being obtrusive, and the whole is laden with a creepy atmosphere of cold cerebral obsession (this quality probably being the main reason people either love or hate this film).Reasons for some dissatisfaction might include the hallucination sequences being only vaguely delineated from the rest of the narrative, which causes some confusion, and the discontinuity of the plot, in which story and character are artfully sketched rather than fully filled out.The ending is also problematic, but it is unsatisfying only in as much as total comprehension of the universe by the human mind is an impossible dream. It is this intellectual tantalization which is, I believe, the point of the film.