Pi in the Sky

Rating: 8/10 (12 December 2014)

Really enjoyed this movie because it was an intellectual thriller and quest story. Thought the music was viscerally appropriate and the herky-jerky pace riveting. No, I cannot say this movie inspired me to more thoroughly peruse my copy of 'Mathematics and the Imagination', but I can't remember when a movie ever inspired me to read a book, albeit it has often been the other way around. However, I could appreciate that this was a cautionary tale about what happens when you seek the answer to everything all by your lonesome.
Max Cohen is a driven paranoiac blessed with computational altitude that he uses to impress the little Chinese girl in the Park. Naturally, you see the stereotypes at work; Jewish people and Orientals are naturally presumed to be really smart. But somehow I didn't mind. I could go with it, because I know Jewish people and Orientals who are really smart.
The obsessive and compulsive nature of the narrative gets under your skin and gets you going with the protagonist. He's devoting all his time to discovering something truly important, but one gets the feeling he may end up staring at the Sun too long again with injurious consequences. The allusion to Icarus is something of a foreshadowing about what is to come.
You could say Max's closest companion is his supercomputer Euclid which he built himself. He'll have nothing to do with the girl next door in his apartment building named Devi. After all, what could she offer him and his work except the care and the concern that would help relieve his migraine headaches and keep him from cracking up. Sol, the friend and mentor whom he visits from time to time, keeps trying to tell him that there's more to life than mathematics. You would think that some one with his intelligence might grasp the possibility of this simple fact. But you know what happens when you find out you're really good at something. It becomes your whole world even when it's not THE world.
Max's hard work leads to his computer crashing and ejaculating before it does an odd string of numbers 216 digits long. Somehow it becomes apparent that this number might be the mathematical name for God. Once Max has this number in his head it seems to him that everybody is after him, from Hasidic Jews and Rabbis ready to prep mankind for the Messianic Age to secret agents like Marcy Dawson from Wall Street seeking to use his new found knowledge for their own ends.
The thing that was fascinating was how Max appeared to be in a race against his own worsening pain. This occurring still despite his much sought after breakthrough and epiphany concerning numbers as the underlying nature of everything. More than once I thought he was really attempting to find a mathematical solution to resolve the periodic and inevitable onslaught of his own agony. It looked and felt like God was punishing him for attempting to know things without adequate preparation.
I loved when his mentor Sol shared with him the anecdote about Archimedes and how his wife made him take a bath and this led to the breakthrough that made him run naked through the streets shouting 'Eureka!'. It's one of the interesting themes of this fascinating noir film. The idea that Cosmic Intelligence is not for the cloistered few but is an inclusive function and faculty of all mankind. Lone wolves plumb and probe its depths at their own risk and may be consumed by it when it becomes too late.