PI (Artisan) Starring: Sean Gullette, Mark Margolis, Ben Shenkman. Screenplay: Darren Aronofsky. Producer: Eric Watson. Director: Darren Aronofsky. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, violence, adult themes) Running Time: 85 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
In contemporary popular art, there's a very fine line between sheer brilliance and head-smacking pretentiousness. It's a line most visionary film directors flirt with on a regular basis, to the point of tying said line into the occasional sheepshank knots. It almost seems as though, for all their periodic misfires, film-makers like David Lynch, Terry Gilliam and Stanley Kubrick have no choice but to take you places no one else can or will take you. Every true film lover relishes the moment of discovery when a film suggests the emergence of a challenging new voice. You suspect that even though the film you are watching may not be great, the creative mind behind it could be.
Darren Aronofsky's debut feature PI may not be a work of pure originality -- the echoes of Lynch's ERASERHEAD are too distinct -- but I can virtually guarantee you won't see anything else like it this year. The subject, amazingly enough, is theoretical mathematics, centering on a reclusive math savant named Max Cohen (Sean Gullette). Max lives in a New York apartment on the verge of swallowing him whole, a jungle of wiring and circuitry powering his supercomputer Euclid. His obsessive goal is proving that there is a mathematical pattern in every complex system, a theory he tests by attempting to develop a perfect method for predicting the behavior of the stock market. Euclid responds to Max's programming by spitting out a 216-digit number, a number Max initially believes to be useless. That's before his mentor (Mark Margolis) drops oblique hints as to the number's relevance, before a Hassidic scholar (Mark Margolis) suggests that the number is the key to understanding the mind of God, and before a group of homicidal stock brokers seem prepared to do anything it takes to get their hands on the number.
At its core, PI is an Icarus fable of a man reaching for knowledge beyond his capacity to handle it, with a side order of cyber-era isolation cautionary tale. Aronofsky uses voice-over narration effectively to get us inside Max's seizure-wracked head (with superb musical assistance from Clint Mansell of Pop Will Eat Itself), showing us the world as an actualized paranoid fantasy viewed through a self-imposed cage of computers. PI might have been a frighteningly engrossing character study if only Sean Gullette had been able to match the intensity of the material. His Steven Wright-as-computer geek demeanor suggests a typical socially-challenged nerd more often than a man spinning into madness; though he didn't need to bug out his eyes and foam at the mouth, he did need to place Max close enough to the edge for us to see the bottom from there. Gullette's competent but distant performance lowers the stakes of PI's twisted conspiracy theoretics.
It's only when you step back from the narrative of PI that you realize what a singular universe Aronofsky has created. Yes, he does stretch too hard at times to achieve his Lynchian vibe -- grainy black-and-white photography, a mysterious sticky substance, blinding flashes of light and a brain covered with ants do not necessarily a profound statement make. But who else would construct a psychological thriller around large number theory, Wall Street and the Kaballah? Who else would create visuals as distinct as Max's techno-organic apartment, or make an audience squirm so violently at the do-not-try-this-at-home use of a certain power tool? And who else has demonstrated the cinematic instincts to turn a scene of a man writing down numbers into something more tension-packed than a dozen Hollywood chase scenes. The most obvious antecedent may be Lynch, but even Lynch's hypnotic images have rarely been this kinetic. Though Aronofsky may have been limited by finances, available talent or technical constraints, he has created a work which leaves you hungry for what he could do next. PI is the creation of that one film-maker in a hundred who seems unlikely to make movies by the numbers.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 beta pi's: 7.
Visit Scott Renshaw's MoviePage http://www.inconnect.com/~renshaw/ *** Subscribe to receive new reviews directly by email! See the MoviePage for details, or reply to this message with subject line "Subscribe".
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews