Pi (1998)

A Debut Like No Other

Pi is one of the most striking debut films of the nineties. Darren Aronofsky made it for about sixty thousand dollars, much of it raised by asking friends and family for a hundred dollars each, and shot it in grainy, high-contrast black and white on the streets of New York’s Chinatown. It’s rough, loud, claustrophobic and completely unlike anything else of its time, and it announced a major new director.

It won the directing award at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998 and became a cult hit. Aronofsky went on to make Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler and Black Swan, and all of them have their roots here: the obsessive heroes, the pounding editing, the electronic music and the sense of a mind coming apart. I give it an 8. It’s intense and uneven, and it’s unforgettable.

It’s also a remarkable example of how much a film can do with how little. There are no stars, no special effects and almost no locations beyond a few apartments, streets and subway cars. Everything the film achieves comes from its ideas, its style and its sheer nervous energy. That’s exactly why it still feels fresh.

Max Cohen

Max Cohen is a brilliant, reclusive mathematician who lives alone in a cramped Chinatown apartment filled with computers he built himself. He suffers from crippling migraines and pops pills to control them, and he has devoted his life to a single belief. He’s convinced that mathematics is the language of nature, that everything around us can be represented by numbers and that if you graph those numbers, patterns emerge.

He believes there’s a pattern everywhere in nature, and he’s trying to find the one behind the stock market. His homemade computer, Euclid, crunches the numbers day and night. Max narrates his own life in a flat, precise voice, repeating his assumptions and recording his migraines like a scientist, and the film puts us so tightly inside his head that we share his paranoia.

Sean Gullette, who co-wrote the story with Aronofsky, plays Max with a twitchy, haunted intensity that carries the film. He’s in almost every scene, and his growing fear and exhaustion are completely convincing. He shaved his head for the role, and his gaunt, sweating face, lit harshly in the black and white, becomes one of the film’s most memorable images.

The Number

One day Euclid, after crashing, prints out a string of stock predictions and a 216-digit number, and then fails. Max throws the printout away in disgust. The next day, he discovers the predictions were correct. The number, whatever it is, seems to be the key to the pattern he’s been looking for.

From there, everyone wants it. A ruthless Wall Street firm, led by a woman called Marcy Dawson, wants to use Max’s work to predict the market and has been watching him. A group of Hasidic Jews, led by a man called Lenny Meyer whom Max meets in a coffee shop, believes the number may be the true name of God, hidden in the Torah, and wants it for religious reasons.

Max is pursued by both, and he begins to believe that the number is more than a mathematical discovery. It may be the key to everything, and it may be driving him mad. His migraines grow worse, his paranoia deepens, and he begins to see the number and its patterns everywhere, from the stock pages to the faces of strangers on the subway.

Sol

Max’s only real friend is his old mentor, Sol Robeson, a retired mathematician who spent years searching for patterns in pi before suffering a stroke. Mark Margolis plays him with a gentle, tired wisdom. The two men play Go together, and Sol uses the ancient Chinese board game to teach Max about complexity: simple rules that produce endless, unpredictable possibilities.

Sol warns Max that he’s heading down the same path that ruined his own health. He had found patterns everywhere too, he says, and they led nowhere. Some patterns are just what the mind creates when it looks too hard. Max doesn’t listen. He’s convinced he’s closer than Sol ever was.

Their relationship is the film’s emotional heart, and its tragedy. Sol has already seen what the search does to a person, and he can’t stop his student from making the same mistake. When Sol himself returns to the search, and it destroys him, Max loses the one person who understood him.

Mathematics and Mysticism

The film is full of real mathematical ideas, and it uses them with surprising seriousness for a thriller. There’s the golden ratio, the Fibonacci sequence and the spiral that appears in nautilus shells, sunflowers and galaxies, and Max traces it everywhere he looks, from the swirl of milk in his coffee to the patterns of smoke.

It also draws on the Kabbalah and gematria, the Jewish mystical tradition of assigning numbers to Hebrew letters and searching the Torah for hidden meanings. Lenny shows Max how words can be converted into numbers and linked to each other, and Max sees the same patterns emerging in religion as in mathematics.

The film doesn’t claim any of this is true. It’s interested in what happens to a mind that believes it could be, and in the thin line between genius and madness, discovery and delusion. Pi is about the hunger for meaning, and about what that hunger can do. Max’s search is part science, part faith and part illness, and the film refuses to separate the three.

The Migraines

Max’s migraines are the film’s most harrowing element. They come on without warning, and Aronofsky films them as sensory assaults: flashing light, pounding sound, distorted faces and the camera shaking with pain. Max collapses, shakes and hallucinates, and each attack is worse than the last. They’re some of the most viscerally uncomfortable sequences in nineties cinema, and anyone who suffers from migraines will recognize the terrible accuracy of the flashing light and the pressure behind the eyes.

As the film goes on, the migraines and the hallucinations merge, and neither Max nor the audience can tell what’s real. He sees a brain on a subway platform and follows a trail of blood. He finds ants swarming over his computer, and he starts to believe the number is burning a hole in his mind. The film never tells us how much of it is really happening.

This uncertainty is the film’s greatest strength. By the final act, we’re so deep inside Max’s perspective that we have no way to judge his discoveries objectively. We’re as trapped as he is, and just as desperate for the pattern to mean something.

The Style

Aronofsky and his cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, shot the film on black and white reversal stock. That gives it an extremely grainy, high-contrast look, the whites burning out and the blacks swallowing everything. It looks like a nightmare photocopied too many times, and it suits the story perfectly. It also turns the budget into a virtue. There’s no money for sets or lighting, so the film embraces the raw texture of the city and the cramped rooms, and it looks far more distinctive than most expensive films of its time.

The editing is fast and jagged, with rapid montages of pills, fingers, locks and eyes, repeated every time Max takes his medication. The camera is often attached to Max’s body, so it moves with him, and the world stays still around him. The sound design is aggressive and relentless. These techniques would become Aronofsky’s signature, and they’re at their rawest here.

The Score

Clint Mansell, a former member of the British band Pop Will Eat Itself, wrote the score, a relentless electronic pulse that drives the film forward like a racing heartbeat. It’s joined by tracks from electronic artists including Aphex Twin, Massive Attack, Orbital and Autechre, and the soundtrack became a landmark of late-nineties electronic music.

It was the start of a long partnership between Mansell and Aronofsky. Mansell went on to write the famous score for Requiem for a Dream and many of Aronofsky’s other films. In Pi, the music is as important as the images in creating the film’s feeling of mounting pressure. Try watching a scene with the sound off, and it loses half its force.

The Ending

The final act is feverish and disturbing. Max, pursued by the Wall Street firm and the Hasidim, overwhelmed by migraines and convinced that the number is destroying him, finally takes a drastic, violent step to rid himself of his own mathematical gift. The film doesn’t show it in detail, and it doesn’t need to.

The epilogue is quiet and surprising. Max sits on a park bench, calm and unburdened, and a little girl who has often asked him to do mental arithmetic asks him a sum. He can’t do it anymore, and he smiles. He’s lost his genius, and with it his torment. Whether that’s a tragedy or a release is left to the audience.

Where Pi Falls Short

It’s rough in places. Some of the performances are stiff, the pacing is relentless enough to exhaust, and the plot, with its rival Wall Street and religious factions, is closer to a thriller than to the philosophical story it wants to be. The low budget shows, and some viewers will find the whole experience too aggressive to enjoy.

On the other side, it’s startlingly original, and it achieves a great deal with almost nothing. The style is bold, the ideas are fascinating, and the portrait of a mind consumed by obsession is frightening. It earns an 8, and few debuts of its decade are as impressive. Only someone with nothing to lose could have made it, and it has the energy of that freedom in every frame.

Craft Note

The Verdict on Pi

Yes. It’s an 8, a feverish, original thriller about obsession, made on almost no money by a director who went on to great things. It’s intense and exhausting, and it’s worth watching for anyone interested in Aronofsky, in low-budget filmmaking or in films that dare to take ideas seriously.

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