Pi: Artisan Entertainment
Rating: USA: R/ UK: 15/ Australia: M

When director Darren Aronofsky’s (Requiem for a Dream) 1998 film Pi debuted, I took a pass on seeing it. No matter how many glowing reviews I read, nor how many friends regaled me with tales if its brilliance, I stayed away from it. Something about it just reeked of pretentiousness to me…whether it was the grainy black and white film stock, the jerky editing, or the Pi symbol title, I couldn’t say. However, after nearly three years of hearing about how I needed to see this film (which came mostly from my girlfriend—who’s far more interested in math and number theory than I), I finally relented—and my initial feelings were confirmed.

Maximillian Cohen (Sean Gullette: Requiem for a Dream) is a sociophobic New Yorker with a penchant for numbers. He lives in a small and cluttered apartment, sharing space with a monstrous homemade mainframe computer. He spends his days fighting off seizures and studying Pi (which is a mathematical number that starts with 3.14 and continues on into infinity). Max believes that math holds the key to the universe—that there’s an inherent mathematical pattern in everything, and that by figuring it out he can understand everything. His work draws the attention of two distinctly different groups—a Wall Street firm who wants him to unlock the secrets of the stock market, and a group of Hasidic Jews who believe his work will lead to the true name of God. Both sides will do anything for this knowledge, which ultimately puts Max’s life in danger.

The premise sounds intriguing, doesn’t it? Even a non-math guy like me can appreciate that there’s some sort of mathematical order to much (if not everything) in the universe. Aronofsky creates the scenario (and borrows a bit from David Lynch’s Eraserhead as well as Arthur C. Clarke’s story The Nine Billion Names of God), but ultimately seems incapable of seeing it through to any kind of meaningful conclusion. What starts off as an intriguing idea quickly devolves into a miasmic mess of half-formed ideas, jarring film technique, and cinematic nihilism before arriving at a climax that’s completely predictable and largely a cop out. I like films with grand ideas driving them, but if you’re going to utilize a grand idea, then you’d better come up with a grand ending to fit the idea—and Pi fails miserably in that regard.

For all its sound and visual fury, Pi often comes across as an empty cinematic experience. It’s a film school project blown up to feature length—and like most film school projects, it’s a lot grander looking on paper than it is on the big screen. Aronofsky pulls out one odd shot or jarring edit after another to draw attention away from the fact that he’s only really got about half a story at work here. Yet, all the cinematic tricks, cool shots, and noirish black and white film stock in the world can’t hide the problems with the film—and all Aronofsky really succeeds in doing is glossing over the flaws in hopes that the average filmgoer might not notice them.

In short, Pi is an unpleasant film—the theatrical equivalent of listening to someone drag a fork across a chalkboard. This isn’t an inherently bad thing on its own—unpleasant films can still be good. However, the problem with Pi is that it seems to exist solely to be unpleasant—and that’s a double-edged sword that it ultimately dies by. In the early going, this nihilistic tone and stark cinematography works. An audience is drawn into Max’s obsessive little world and feels the pain of his seizures (thanks to an often jarring musical score and shaky handheld camera work). Unfortunately, there’s no reprieve from these scenes, and by the thirty-minute mark, I was tired of seeing the same images again and again, as well as drained from the experience. Simply put, you have to give an audience a moment to catch their breath—and this film never does that. It’s an all out assault of grainy images, rough edits, and jarring music that ultimately succeeded in giving me a headache.

Another problem is that the film spends a lot of its eighty-five minute running time going nowhere. Film is a visual medium, so dialogue should be kept to a minimum, but conversely, you’ve got to put some interesting visuals on the screen—an area where Aronofsky fails again. It’s just not exciting watching Max hold his head in his hands, ponder over his computer, repeat notes to himself, or suffer through his 300th seizure. Yet, that’s what Aronofsky gives us for much of the film—that and shots of a man with blood dripping off of his hand and a removed brain. Truthfully, it’s reminiscent of the cliché about French art films—films where people do little more than sit around smoking cigarettes while looking moody.

Of course, the film does have some plusses and it wouldn’t be fair to not mention them. Sean Gullette does a very good job in the lead role, making Max a credible character who you can almost sympathize with. Perhaps the greatest testament to the power of his performance is in the fact that he actually makes you feel some of this character’s anguish and the agony of his medical condition.

Aronofsky does have an eye for odd visuals, even if he goes overboard with them or presents them in a way that seems pretentious. There’s no denying that Pi is a film that sucks you into its world—it’s just not a world that many folks would want to be pulled into. This is certainly a director with talent, and once he learns a little more about pacing, and drops some of the pretentious film school tricks from his repertoire, he’ll probably be a guy to keep your eye on.

Unfortunately, those two plusses don’t manage to counterbalance the negatives, and because of this, Pi fails as a film on nearly every level. With some more work (primarily creating a script with an ending that actually does something with the premise instead of simply copping out) Pi could have been one of the really great independent films to come out in the past decade. Instead, it’s an oddity—a cult film that has some interesting ideas at work in it, but one that ultimately fails to combine them in a way that makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts.


Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older