Pi

Yesterday when I arrived at work, there was apple pie and chocolate mousse pie in the kitchen—along with a note that read "Happy Pi (3.14) Day." (Let it not be said that my co-workers don't have a sense of humor!) But the association of pi with the date, March 14, brought to mind Darren Aronofsky's breakout film Pi: Faith in Chaos.

Filmed in a very grainy black and white, Pi was Aronofsky's indie film debut during the late '90s, and I must say, it holds up remarkably well today! Pi tells the story of Max Cohen (played by Sean Gullette), a mathematician who's searching for a numeric pattern to the stock market. In frequent, often repeating voiceovers, Max tells us his mathematical assumptions: that the world is made up of numbers, that it can be deciphered through numbers, that patterns can emerge from these numbers—and that these patterns can unlock the mysteries of this world. This is Max's driving force, and using a home-built supercomputer he calls Euclid, he tests program after program in the hopes of finding a key to the mystery behind the stock market.

Max as a character, though, is plagued by headaches and tremors (that border on hallucinations), often resorting to his veritable pharmacy of medications to keep himself at ease. Though I don't believe Max's headaches and tremors are necessarily the result of bad genes: I think that Max is often on the verge of collapse from the weight of his own genius and mental processes, for he is a man who is totally obsessed with his work, and is probably overwhelmed by his own mental faculties. I mean, the man can compute large equations inside his own head—as he often does for one of his neighbors, young Jenna, who frequently asks him to mentally compute numbers for her own amusement. Though this irritates Max, who lives a very private life, secludes himself in his world of numbers and theories, and doesn't like to associate with anyone, except maybe for Sol (Aronofsky regular Mark Margolis), a neighbor who also used to be a mathematician . . . though Max silently desires his smokin' hot neighbor Devi.

At a coffee shop one day, Max meets a Hasidic Jew named Lenny Meyer, who just so happens to work with numbers, too. Though instead of the stock market, Lenny's medium is the Torah, which he believes contains a code from God that's 216 numeric digits long . . . and it just so happens that right around this same time, Max himself stumbles across a 216-digit number. Because while running a new program on Euclid one day, two outrageous stock picks come up, Euclid spits out a 216-digit number, and then totally crashes. At first Max dismisses the stock picks and the long number—until both picks turn out to be correct, leaving Max to wonder just what this 216-digit number really is.

From this point on, Max is continually hassled by Lenny, who's ever-so-conveniently around every corner, as well as Marcy Dawson, an intrusive Wall Street executive who wants Max's genius for her own financial reasons. This drives Max deeper and deeper into his mathematical obsessions, because now he has to know, at any cost, just what this 216-digit number is . . . and what it can mean for his work.

Pi reminds many viewers of David Lynch's Eraserhead, largely because of the filmic style but also because of the symbolism and the examination of the human mind. Because at the same time, Pi is a character study about solitude and obsession—and a philosophical examination about the mysteries to life. As to the former, take for instance when Max travels the subway. He always sees the same old man sitting near him, then the next minute he's gone. Does he exist only in Max's tired mind? There's also a strange scene where Max kneels down by the subway station stairs—and finds a human brain sitting on one of the steps. His poking it with the pen could almost symbolize Max's delicate yet continual thought process—picking his brain, as it were.

The camerawork in the subway scenes (as well as the foot chase scenes) was often very jumpy. I'd bet that Aronofsky used the handheld camera for many of his shots, which isn't totally surprising, given that this was a low-budget film. But we also see the first instance of what has become an Aronofsky trademark: his quick-cut editing. In Requiem for a Dream, he used it to symbolize a drug high. In Pi, he used it to symbolize Max's retreat into his anxiety medications.

But as Max explores the 216-digit number more and more, he comes to think that he's found his ultimate answer through this number, that it contains all the answers he seeks—not just in the stock market, but in life itself. Sort of like finding God through numbers. But along with this key comes the abuse of these answers, as exemplified by Marcy Dawson's ruthless attempts to gain access to it. Or in Lenny's sect trying to acquire the number for their own purposes. But is Max any different? He's using the number to gain predictive ability over the stock market, and I think this contributes to his final mental collapse—that and his continued isolation from the outside world. He's become so steeped in his work that he's totally lost touch with an essential component of life: human contact, as indicated by his anxiety attacks whenever he hears Devi's sexual romps through his apartment wall.

In the final analysis, though, one very major question is asked vis-à-vis Max's final breakdown: are there some truths, some answers to life that are really too big for the human mind to understand? When Max burns the number at the end, it always breaks my heart, because he's throwing away a key to humanity, to possible transcendence above what we currently are . . . but it's almost right that he destroys the number, because our human minds have not yet developed to the level where we can understand the enormity behind this key to life . . . and when our obsessions consume us to the breaking point, maybe we need to step back and smell the flowers. 9 out of 10.