Originally published in Cinema Knife Fight, October 7, 2010
“As soon as you discard scientific rigor, you’re no longer a mathematician, you’re a numerologist. “
Mmmm, pie.
This quote—a warning to genius mathematician Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) by his former mentor Sol Robeson (Mark Margolis), is a pivotal point in the movie PI(1998). That’s Pi, as in 3.14159265 etc. —not “private investigator,” nor that steaming circle of deliciousness which fills so many kitchens everywhere in the fall. The quote, spoken as a rebuke, but meant as a warning, sums up the overall theme of this mind-bending trip to Math-a-magic land by first-time (when PIcame out, that is) feature director and writer Darren Aronofsky, who later gave us THE FOUNTAIN (2006) and THE WRESTLER (2008).
When I was in my teens, a few friends got into that whole backwards-masking shtick. If you play, for example, Stairway to Heaven backwards, you hear Robert Plant chant, “There’s no escaping it,” or mutter the infamous numbers666. Play enough songs backwards, and aside from freaking yourself out, you’re bound to hear plenty of satanic voices, like those snippets of otherworldly mutterings captured on digital recorders in so many ghost chaser TV shows. Search for patterns long enough, and you’re bound to find them. But what if these patterns are real?
Max Cohen is an agoraphobic recluse, a mathematic genius bent on discovering a pattern in everything in the world. He tries to prove this using a home-made supercomputer in his ant-infested apartment, developing a quantitative method of predicting the stock market. The more complex his methods become (both in his programming and his mind), the better the process works, to the point where he succeeds in determining major fluctuations in stock values. Not that he invests any money himself, he’s just using it to prove his theories. Also, the point of doing all this, he stresses, is not to come up with a way of guessing stock prices, but to look at events, figures, patterns on the surface, and see below, quite a few layers deeper, where the chaotic, unstructured pattern of numbers and actions and reactions in everyday life, no matter how random any of them may seem, has a pattern. And that pattern can be discovered, understood. Then what? Well, he doesn’t really think that far.
But others have. People have been paying close attention to Max’s work. But I jump ahead.
When he was a child, Max tells us—via a recorded log in the film’s opening and throughout the movie—he ignored his mother’s warning not to stare into sun and did just that, stared so long, in fact, that he went temporarily blind. Naturally, it doesn’t take long for the Icarus comparison to come up in the story. Flying too close to the sun is the overall theme of the film, in fact. Before your wings melt, however, what would you see? What indeed?
19:57. Know Thyself: Observation #872. Have you noticed that I tend to write my reviews in the general style of the film in question? I… ahh! My daughter’s guinea pig just peed on me.. sorry. Lost the flow. Hang on.
3.14159265358…..
OK, I’m better now. PI is an interesting duck of a film. Shot entirely in black and white. Really grainy black and white, to boot. We see the world much like Max does, in scattershot sensory overloaded input crowding into a brain which constantly studies and patterns and… changes. He’s getting close, and what he’s coming close to is, well, killing him. Max suffers from terrible migraines, which he tries to suppress with a plethora of drugs, mostly to no avail. The chaos of most scenes in the film, including his “spells”, does calm at times, smoothes out, especially in one particular setting—the apartment of Sol Robeson, the “Obi Wan Kenobi” of PI, and a man who had once reached, in his own past research, the point where his protégé is now, and it nearly killed him. The scenes remain black and white, but the editing is less static, more fixed-camera. The two men sit across from a Go table (an ancient Chinese board game) and talk shop, everything calm, two people of equal intellect discussing math theory, and stuff. Sol’s apartment is Max’s oasis, his Nostromo Mother Room (look it up).
As mentioned, two distinct groups of people have taken a keen interest in our little math whiz. Bad guys and good guys, though in this film the two sometimes feel interchangeable. A nameless Wall Street firm wants Max’s talent and research for obvious reasons, and their representative Marcy Dawson, played with delightful, obnoxiously insistent devilishness by Pamela Hart (CHANGING LANES, 2002) is not one to take “No” for an answer. My favorite secondary character, however, is a Hasidic Jew named Lenny (Ben Shenkman, who played the “Agent to the Spies” for a spell in last year’s BURN NOTICE, 2009). Lenny is a fellow pattern mathematician who studies the Torah searching for messages from God. You see, the Hebrew alphabet is really a series of numbers, and the more he explains this to Max, the more interested our hapless hero becomes. Lenny and his group of Kabbalists, who have devoted their lives to unlocking the secrets of the Torah, work on pulling Max into their quest as insistently (though much less harshly) as Marcy’s troupe. Shenkman’s performance is powerful but understated. He’s got a strong screen presence and it shows in his scenes with Gullette’s introverted Max. You want to like Lenny, but there’s a fierceness behind his expressions, which is a constant pleasure to watch and see what comes of it.
In the end, everyone is looking for a 216-digit number, which legend has it is the key to unlocking, well, everything! When Max’s supercomputer comes up with the number midway through the film, all hell breaks loose. Or maybe it’s not hell.
Anyway… I hate giving to much of a synopsis, but in some cases I find myself lost in trying to explain a movie. I think I used the term “mind-bender” earlier, and this one certainly is. Trying to follow everything going on in PI is akin to Max trying to understand every pattern in the universe. Don’t bother, you’ll hurt yourself. The ending is, well, what you’d expect in a film like this—open to interpretation. Did this happen, or did that? What was real, and what was… well, you get the point.
One thing about PI which I did not fathom (and there was more than one) – wasPi itself. Max (and his mentor) have spent their lives studying Pi: A mathematical number representing the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle (yea, I looked that up on Google, because if I misstate it here my genius son will mock me). Our mathematicians, however, seem more intent on pattern recognition, and the 216-digit number in question, than Pi. Seriously, maybe Aronofsky had to work Pi into the screenplay simply because it’s more recognizable a mathematical term, and has a bit of mythos (at least in the world of mathematicians). Not to mention PI is a far catchier title for a film thanMYSTERIOUS NUMBER LOST WHEN ISRAEL WAS SACKED BY ROME.
I enjoyed PI, found it intellectually stimulating in some ways, but in other ways it’s a freaking depressing movie. PI is a very introverted film, and since we see the story unfold through the eyes of a majorly screwed-up dude, we’re not going to feel the warm fuzzies watching it. Maybe that’s another reason why Shenkman’s Lenny character was so appealing. He is one of the few characters not infinitely angst-ridden. So plan on seeing this film for its uniqueness, its merging of religion and math and greed – greed for power and for knowledge.
When you’re done watching PI, however, go watch a few episodes of the TV series BIG BANG THEORY (2007 – present). You’ll need it to remember how fun science and math can be. No, seriously, math can be fun. In study hall back in high school, when I was bored (most of the time), I’d sometimes do long division to pass the time. Yea, I know, I had no life. But neither does Max, except for his love of Pi. And pie.