Susan Granger's review of "PI" (Artisan Entertainment)
Darren Aronofsky won the Director's Award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival for this low-budget, black-and-white cinematic calculus which explores the meaning of life through numbers. Sean Gullette plays a renegade math genius with a troubled genealogy that goes back to Dr. Frankenstein. Caught between blinding flashes of brilliance and equally blinding migraine headaches, he searches his home-built super-computer, named Euclid, for a formula that will reveal a numerical pattern within the chaos of the stock market. He's obsessed with finding a unifying order in everything - from the cream spiraling in his coffee to the infinite possibilities in his weekly board games with his mentor, Mark Margolis. His research makes him popular with rabid Wall Street analysts as well as with Orthodox Jewish cabalists who believe that he has stumbled upon a 216-digit number that will reveal God's first name. "The Torah's just a long stream of numbers," he's told by Ben Shenkman, a Jewish numerologist. "Some say it's a code, sent by God." What does the title mean? When the Greek mathematician Archimedes couldn't calculate the answer to a difficult problem, he gave up and retired to his bath where, in repose, the solution - the mathematical notation used to represent the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter - suddenly came to him. What does dense, tormented Max discover? A secret everyone is willing to kill for. Despite its wobbly, hand-held photography and grainy texture, on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Pi" is an eccentric, cerebral 7, concluding that life doesn't fall into predictable patterns and complete control is impossible. It's an imaginative, intellectually stimulating feature-film debut for this promising writer/director.
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