Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky makes weird movies. Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream have moments of extreme camp in-between some fairly freaky narratives. I quite dug his Biblical allegory mother!, but I know plenty of other people were put off, and it was obvious why to anyone who saw it. Even something straightforward like The Wrestler has its share of generally off-putting moments.
For the most part, I dig what he does. So, seeing it was included on Amazon Prime, I finally got around to seeing his first movie, the numerically-minded Pi. Will the weirdness be present from the beginning?
You bet your sweet Aunt Petunia it’s there.
Paranoid mathematician Max (Sean Guillette) lives alone in an apartment with extra padlocks and a computer he built himself. Something of a math prodigy who does impressive arithmetic in his head to the entertainment of a young neighbor, Max is convinced that math and numbers can give away the secrets of the universe. All of nature, he believes, can be mathematically predicted, and he’s working on finding a formula that can predict the stock market. I don’t get the impression Max wants to make money that way–arguably, he doesn’t really have any to invest with anyway–but this seems to be his white whale. Otherwise, he goes about his business, seeing an old mentor named Sol, maybe ignoring the potential flirtations of a female neighbor (she’s pretty friendly to a guy who isn’t friendly to anyone), avoiding his landlady, and trying to avoid the debilitating headaches he keeps having.
Those headaches get worse when he finds a 216 digit number that may be the key to the universe. Whether it does or it doesn’t, other people want it in the form of shadowy agents who want to play the market and a group of Hasidic Jews who think the number might represent the name of God. It may be moot since simply knowing the number just increases Max’s headaches to nearly unbearable levels.
Aranofsky made this movie in black-and-white, using a cast of actors who, even today, are only vaguely familiar. And yeah, it’s his standard crazy. The grainy look of the film actually helps here. It gives the film a rather shady look, representing Max’s inner turmoil well. Sol’s apartment seems clearest, and he is the man who understands Max’s problems the best in part because he used to have them. Outside of Sol’s, the dark shadows make the story and Max’s understanding of what’s going on all the murkier. Black and white film can be used to make some really strong impressions, and Aranofosky uses it well.
But what do we make of a movie where math is both the cause of and the solution to a protagonist’s problems? The film ends with Max happy, but likewise unable to do math in his head anymore. Math may be the solution to all of existence, but perhaps knowing too much just makes things worse. Then again, that might be a lesson for everyone: we may not be meant to know exactly how everything works, so why not just sit back and enjoy it?
Grade: B+
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