Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

"On the contrary, I believe firmly. I believe the universe is a great symphony of numerical correspondences, I believe that numbers and their symbolisms provide a path to special knowledge. But if the world, below and above, is a system of correspondences where tout se tient, it's natural for the kiosk and the pyramid, both works of man, to reproduce in their structure, unconsciously, the harmonies of the cosmos. The so-called pyramidologists discover with their incredibly tortuous methods a straightforward truth, a truth far more ancient, and one already known. It is the logic of research and discovery that is tortuous, because it is the logic of science. Whereas the logic of knowledge needs no discovery, because it knows already."
- from Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco, 1988

"Recognize your God for whatever you conceive him to be, Cosmic Muffin or Hairy Thunderer."
- from National Lampoon's take on the Desiderata


About twenty minutes into watching this film, I began to get the niggling feeling I was moving through familiar territory. It happens sometimes, and usually helps to ruin my experience of the film. I know you know what I mean: that groan you hear a film make as it hauls itself wearily around the corner from the second act into the third, the unwanted certainty to within three guesses as to how the film will end, and even - certainly for me this is true of Pi - a sense that you've read some of the same books the director has. That last one is particularly niggling to me, especially since I'm watching a searingly promising work from an acclaimed auteur, showered with awards and a several-picture deal on the strength of a film whose central conflict he may have - wittingly or unwittingly - plagiarized.

This is nothing new in the cinema and under the circumstances (I'll get to those) not unforgivable. Indeed, anything done for the first time relies heavily on example. It just seems to be happening a lot here of late, particularly with the most recent crop of brilliant writers and stunning auteurs. Their films seem to be based on - or at least partially influenced by - some very specific works that stick in my head, and I am at a loss as to whether this constitutes plagiarism or merely respectful nods to brighter lights.

Let me give you an example of my confusion before I get to Pi: I believe Christopher McQuarrie's academy-award-winning screenplay of The Usual Suspects bears a remarkable - some would say identical - resemblance to The Secret Six, a lesser-known, short-lived comic series that was published by DC Comics some time ago. In the course of that comic, six people are blackmailed into doing the bidding of a mysterious individual named Mockingbird, an infamous international criminal. Mockingbird communicated with his operatives by pre-recorded tapes, on which he disguised his face and voice. Slowly it was revealed that Mockingbird was one of the Six, as he could not possibly have known the things he revealed to them in his tapes unless he was one of them. If you build a screenplay on this relationship between the Six as a central theme, but update and energize the story for a modern filmgoing audience, you might end up with The Usual Suspects, although I wouldn't be surprised to find that The Secret Six is not the earliest example of this plot device.

So, did Mr. McQuarrie steal this clever structure? Who knows? To be fair and even, I have no proof that Mr. McQuarrie has ever even picked up a Superman comic.
He may not even be aware this comic exists - it may be that the plot of the comic was itself borrowed - but the similarities are too strong to dismiss the possibility out of hand. Mr. McQuarrie is a relatively young American male, who very probably had ready access to comics in his formative years. His current project, according to IMDB.com, is a big screen adaptation of The Prisoner, a television show revered by many comic fans. It is reasonable to assume from this that he has at least some knowledge of genre-specific pop culture, though it does not necessarily extend to comics.

However, it must be noted - the element that transmutes the material is Mr. McQuarrie. He brings in subtle changes that enrich the plot and introduces immediacy, most notably bringing in a streetwise dialogue and a disgustingly clever sequence in Chazz Palminteri's office. So this intricate, highly individualized plot structure may not be his - but the story indisputably is.

Does that make it okay?

This could well be the case with Darren Aronofsky, whose film Pi is the story of a brilliant, secular mathematician named Max Cohen, who through the course of his work and the excruciating pain of his medical condition begins to see convoluted conspiracies of numbers in everything he examines. His main focus is the stock market, which he calls a "natural organism", and he has been constantly searching for a pattern in the shifting numerical sands of the global marketplace. Max does this not in pursuit of wealth, but rather in the pursuit of knowledge, with the grim resignation and suicidal determination usually reserved for Everest climbers. He sits day after day in his cramped New York apartment, surrounding himself with the chthonian heuristic computer he's named Euclid, like a caterpillar gathering close his chrysalis. And to continue the metaphor, Max is nearing a breakthrough.

A migraine sufferer since an unfortunate incident in his childhood, Max keeps himself inundated with several different drugs to combat the pain. However, if you listen carefully to the list he rattles off in one of his rants, you will notice that he uses nothing that will relax him or blunt the edge of his mind. In fact, stimulants of all walks are well represented in Max's life, from coffee and cigarettes to those delivered by subcutaneous injections. The migraines happen suddenly, with a telltale tremor of the hand as Max's only warning before the attacks, which are increasing in frequency and intensity since Max refuses to allow himself to relax. His head demands release. A visit to his only human friend and former teacher, Sol Robeson, who functions as the voice of pure reason in the film, does nothing to curb his obsessive drive.

Then one day at a coffee shop he meets Lenny Myer, a Hasidic Jew whose job it is to study the Torah in much the same way as Max is studying the stock market. Lenny, too, is looking for patterns in an effort to make future projections. Only his interpretations of what he finds are informed by Kaballah, that enigmatic system of Jewish mysticism whose practitioners believe in creation through emanation and a cipher method of interpreting scripture. Lenny's hamhanded and intrusive ways of introducing himself to Max assure us this is no accidental meeting. When he and Max compare notes on their work, they find a connection between the number system that represents the words in the Torah and a mathematical postulate called the Fibonacci sequence, which goes to the heart of the mystery of pi, that inviolate and infinite number upon which so much of our work rests.

The connection is startling and sends Max running back to Euclid to alter his program. In response to Max's adjustments- we are never told what these adjustments are - Euclid spits up a printout of two stock picks for the next day's trading, a long string of numbers, and promptly crashes, sending Max into despair. When he cracks Euclid open to examine the burnt chipset in his CPU, he finds a strange, sticky goo that he's pretty sure he didn't put there. Between the printout - it turns out the picks are dead-cert - and the goo, Max discovers something (he believes) truly incredible, and slowly begins to accept that he is a prophet - a delusion encouraged by the migraines and hallucinations brought on by sleep deprivation.

Meanwhile, Marcy Dawson of Lancet Percy (try saying that five times), a "predictive strategy" firm, is doggedly pursuing Max for his applied theories on market projections. Dawson is bright and gladhanding in that irritating way common to used car salesmen and telemarketers, and is at all times flanked by men in cheap suits; this is not a Wall Street firm she represents, despite the appearance of a Lancet-Percy ad in Max's copy of Investor's Business Daily. Through her successive meetings with Max, the true nature of Lancet-Percy is revealed, if not the details of their business. Max's super-intellect is oblivious to her, however, just as he is oblivious to most humans. She's an unpleasant and deadly serious sort, but Max gives this no attention, placing himself haughtily in jeopardy to get what he wants. He only notices her- or Lenny- when he needs something. Using a classified processor on loan from Marcy to repair Euclid and the Torah dataset borrowed from Lenny, Max resurrects his analysis program and instructs it to search for the key to the Torah's code, which is supposedly a number 216 digits long - and is the true name of God. But as he begins to understand what he may have found, he runs headlong into the motivations of those people he has heretofore used and ignored. So he becomes the delusional Prophet of the Word, pursued by servants of both Mammon and Jehovah, who are as single-minded and obsessed as he is.

All of it compelling, yet oddly familiar. The narrative style and plot devices recalled to me the films Three Days of the Condor and Marathon Man, but when we got to the scene where Max is toggling the list of Hebraic characters on his computer into numbers and back again it sent me running straight for Foucault's Pendulum - a book by Umberto Eco. On the very first page of the book I found what I remembered - a list of Hebraic characters as the quote leading into the chapter, and a bit further down the page these words describing the Pendulum:

"I knew - but anyone could have sensed it in the magic of that serene breathing - that the period was governed by the square root of the length of the wire and by pi, that number which, however irrational to sublunar minds, through a higher rationality binds the circumference and diameter of all possible circles. The time it took the sphere to swing from end to end was determined by an arcane conspiracy between the most timeless of measures: the singularity of the point of suspension, the duality of the plane's dimensions, the triadic beginning of pi, the secret quadratic nature of the root, and the unnumbered perfection of the circle itself."

Now, this is purely a circumstantial occurrence to find two elements so closely related to some central devices of the film on the first page of the book in question. Verisimilar numerological vagaries and the occult beliefs connected with them are well documented and may be found in many places. But as I read further, and began to recall what the book was about, the similarities only deepened.

Foucault's Pendulum concerns three editors with strong backgrounds in history, linguistics, and mathematics. They decide one day, as a lark, to create a false history of the world by feeding long strings of historical data - common and obscure - into their computer, which they have named Abulafia. They then instruct the machine to make all possible connections from each piece of data to the other. So essentially what they have created is a computer that recursively remakes the world, over and over again, until it finds the "right" permutation. The editors treat it much the same way as Max does at first - in pursuit of knowledge - but it is when they, like Max, begin to approach a breakthrough, they are themselves approached by others seeking power, who believe that the editors have hit upon powerful knowledge heretofore undiscovered. Then, as the editors themselves start to question how accurate Abulafia can possibly be, they begin to disappear one by one. And they begin to believe they really did "get it", and that this work, previously a game, is important. Unfortunately so do a number of other people. These people, who have functioned up until now as sources of information for the three editors, become adversaries as this game the editors created accelerates and coheres into stark reality.

The name of God and its many permutations is mentioned several times, as is the practice of Kabbalah and a host of other religious sects and occults too numerous to mention here. The corresponding words to the mathematical values on a coveted sheet of paper plays a pivotal role in the book - just as it does in Pi. The paranoid tone of Max Cohen represented in moving images finds itself equally represented in print - in tone and pitch if not in word - by Casaubon's crazed inner dialogues. If you are a fan of this film, you will be surprised at the long list of similarities if you read the book. It'll work out well for you if you couldn't get enough of the obscure references and vaguely unsettling mathematical solutions. The book is so choked with overlapping historical theories and realities that you occasionally wish James Burke would appear to lead you through it.

But of course a string of similarities does not prove the film owes a debt to the book. The coincidences, however, continue in real life.

Darren Aronofsky, who wrote and directed Pi, grew up in Brooklyn and attended Harvard University, concentrating on their live action and animation courses. After this he received his Master's from the American Film Institute. He began attending Harvard in the late eighties, around the same time Umberto Eco published Foucault's Pendulum, which rose to number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Eco, a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna in Italy, at one time held a lectureship in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which is the same school under which Mr. Aronofsky's visual arts classes would have fallen. Mr. Eco's non-fiction books on semiotics are readily available through the Harvard Book Store. Semiotics, by the way, is defined by Webster's as a general philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deal with their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages. Any serious student of cinema, especially one of Mr. Aronofsky's clear skills and sharp attentiveness, might spend some quality time with this discipline; and Harvard seems a very likely place to get introduced to semiotics, as it is an erudite subject.

Continuous calls and emails to Harvard inquiring after when Mr. Eco held his lectureship have thus far yielded no response. So I cannot tell you if in his formative years Mr. Aronofsky had the opportunity to be personally inspired by Mr. Eco.

Or perhaps I, like Max Cohen, have stumbled across my own permutation of the situation, parallel lines in the datastream that allow for such deceptively clear connections like the ones Euclid and Abulafia provide Max and Casaubon. There is certainly a brotherhood between the film and the book, perhaps felt because they both deal with the question of illumination, albeit in different ways. Mr. Aronofsky, Sean Gullette, and Eric Watson, credited with writing the story of Pi, are the only ones who will ever know for sure. Perhaps it was Mr. Gullette or Mr. Watson who read the book. And then again, perhaps they've never seen it. Perhaps like Max at the end of this film, or Casaubon at the end of the book, I've got to realize that things are only as complicated as I want them to be.

Either way, it's fair to say that Mr. Aronofsky has created a film which should be required viewing in filmmaking courses on how to produce a quality first-time independent feature on a low-to-no budget. This is not a student film, regardless of it's reputation with some. A quick glance at the credits will tell you that. Take note. This is how you spend your money when you want to get serious.

The black-and-white photography not only cut his film stock costs almost in half, but gives him more film to shoot the all-important coverage with - something film students forget. His palette at moments recalls the work of Gregg Toland on The Long Voyage Home, where the blacks were so wet and the whites so creamy you felt as if touching the screen could cause the light to come off on your fingers. Moreover, the black and white elements are a perfect visual symbol for the ones and zeros that make up the permutations of binary code. Everything for Max is either yes or no, you either have the answer or you don't, and the absence of color reflects that.

The shooting was largely done either in Max's apartment or in Sol's, leaving the streets and only one other major location - the subway platform, on which Max's hallucinations really kick in. I understand the DVD has an interesting anecdote about how he was able to get permission to shoot there (permits can be difficult to acquire on this level). As visual underpinnings, Mr. Aronofsky chose for Max's apartment, the subway platform, and a Hasidic meeting near the end of the film three locations that clearly resemble temples. And something else Mr. Aronofsky did which was highly intelligent - He suffused the film with insert shots. Lots and lots of them. Insert shots are very easy to control, and especially in a film like this they add to the anxiety and claustrophobia. They also serve to visually reinforce the unseen details that affect us, the reading between the lines in search of truth.

Mr. Aronofsky's spending on the shooting shows he knew how much coverage he would need, how many off-kilter shots he would need, etc. To this end, he made use of whatever he got his hands on: steadicam, doggiecam, dolly, handheld, available light, a bolex camera, and zoom lenses, to name a few. He also was careful to record good sync sound, and took the film through a detailed process of mixing in post, something most first-timers are scared to deal with. He even had a Dolby sound consultant. His editing is nearly impeccable if you consider that on a low-budget film, typically you end up with shots you can't use and will never be able to afford to reshoot. I suspect he went through this with the actress who played Marcy, who is African-American, and often disappears into the greasy black-and-white palette unless he is shooting in broad daylight. Mr. Aronofsky solves this by cutting away from her often, allowing us to hear her motivational-speaker voice as it deteriorates into overt threat.

Although there are several holes in the narrative, the execution - for the level we're talking about here - is nearly flawless. Almost all the actors are committed to their parts, delivering strong choices, and Sean Gullette turns in a piercing performance as Max. Mark Margolis is credible and affecting as Sol.

The biggest mistake in the narrative Mr. Aronofsky makes - and this, I think, should have been resolved before viewing - is the ending, which refuses to answer what happens to Marcy and her thugs or Lenny and his thugs. It's unlikely, after going to so much time and expense, that Marcy in particular would simply let the matter be. In fact, the whole ending of the film is circumspect, after a scene in which the Hasids steal Max from Marcy. Would she not have gone to Max's apartment and cleaned it out, so that perhaps through reverse engineering she would get what she wanted anyway? This is a pretty big hole, but I chalk it up to running out of money. I believe Mr. Aronofsky would have fixed it if he could have.

He's better at this than most. Already he's shooting his follow-up to Requiem for a Dream (based on the book by Hubert Selby), what he calls a "post-Matrix" science-fiction thriller, titled Last Man, with Brad Pitt. He's supposed to follow that with Batman: Year One, and hopes to do Frank Miller's Ronin at some point. He claims his visual style for Pi was based on Miller's Sin City.

There you go. Conclusive proof he reads. I've got him now.


Recommended: Yes

Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age