A disturbing series of levels of metaphysical greatness tending to perfection ...

Rating: 10/10 (24 June 2011)

IRRationality.
And complexity.
THIS is Pi.
This is the number Pi.
AND THis also applies to the movie "Pi".
A MASTERPIece moving the vision of the world to extraordinary levels of abstraction.
GAlileo once said Mathematics was the language with which God has written the universe. Is this a hypothesis or a statement?
IN FACT, a fundamental assumption, in the tormented mind of the math genius Max Cohen, no doubt that the mysteries of life and universe are all governed by the perfect harmony of mathematical patterns.
AND THis perfection inhabiting the mathematical universe is Max's Holy Grail, the key of the ultimate knowledge, the eradication of this torturing and tormenting pain illustrated by a dizzying fast-paced editing, oscillating between harmonic and logical movements and the constant anguish of a man, trapped in his superior cerebral condition, a blessing and a doom.
BUT the grainy, shaky, black and white cinematography with that high contrast, conveys in an extremely efficient way the nightmarish aspect of this quest for mathematical perfection. "Pi" carries the roots, square and weird, of what will constitute the thematic core of Darren Aronofsky's films: physical sufferance, passion that tends to addiction, and addiction as an increasing series of terms that converges to alienation, and in the most extreme cases : death. Life is a convergent sequence with a mortal limit, our painful limitation. The key rhymes with infinity.
INFINity is whatever transcends our human condition, as an entity not defined by the normal rules but something higher, more abstract, unreachable, God-like  the ideal entity that doesn't obey to quantitative rules, whether it's infinite or infinitesimal, the true essence of mathematics. Only an infinite language could have written a universe distinctive by its infinity, Galileo was right, and what Max wants to define is the law that governs the universe, infinity can be defined if not be reached, and there must a pattern that defines the language God wanted to use, that knows the verity about God, His secret  Max's quest transcends the mathematical world to a greater metaphysical level. Is Max Cohen the chosen one among the chosen people? The messenger of God with constant harassment as spiritual persecution? Is he 'Mad Max'? Or 'The Man who Knew Too Much'?
THE PARANoid feeling grows with the sentiment that Max is getting closer to the truth, the universal truth about the supreme mathematical pattern, the Goddess  the one that regulates the ratings in Wall Street or the perfect natural harmonies, the one that kills off the very notion of hazard. There is no hazard, everything is under the control of a perfect and omnipresent law, the perfect law. The perfect law like the perfect ration incarnated by the iconic golden number, you know, that 'theta' you can find everywhere, in architecture, painting, and even in the natural aesthetics of human proportions, the golden ratio as the universal law, the universal incarnation of beauty and perfection illustrated by the golden spiral as the universal movement. The world is a perpetual movement from an infinitesimal start to infinity, whether you find in a sea shell or in the Milky Way. And the paranoia is like a visual demonstration of Max's hypothesis as the very pattern that drives the movie in a self-reflexive way, from a simple quest for knowledge, Max takes a vertiginous tour where he's followed by a big Wall Street firm, a group of Hasidic rabbis, going from a math genius, to a dangerous mind until becoming God's revelation. Max's fate goes out of proportions in a spiral that seems to go unlimited with the core is still poor Max's agonizing head
THE MOVIE Transports us into the nightmarish journey of a man whose obsessive quest for perfection highlights its own futility. Indeed, in a dirty, rotten world, made of impurity, of lies, greed, mediocrity, whatever perfection means, no one human enough to desire would deserve it, not even Max. Max is intelligent, but his intelligence is obviously limited. Take any epsilon, whatever level of intelligence Max's head can elevate itself to, you'll have one level above which the absolute value of the difference between Max's intelligence and its own limitation will be smaller than this epsilon, the drill in the end is that epsilon, and the conclusion is the limitation, eyes can't face sun nor death, said a French philosopher, Max's eyes did both. But Max is only a human and the beauty of mathematic relies sometimes in its irrationality and Max's triumph relies on the recognition of his weakness. If you ask why the movie was titled "Pi" instead of "theta", the golden ratio, well just think of Pi as the incarnation of the irrational number, an idea of perfection that can't be defined through a pattern. Pi is math's infinity and Max's limitation, Pi is Max's truth and the very demonstration that mathematics are superior, no matter what, and this is why, on a more personal level, I always loved mathematics as the universe that can only be defined by its own rules, a world of perfect harmony and total complexity. Remember in the beginning, I described "Pi" as a complex film, it is indeed less in the semantic than the mathematical meaning of the word. "Pi" contains a real and an imaginary part, like in any Aronofsky's film that portrays with a tremendous genius, the impact of our fantasies and our inner fears on our everyday lives. "Pi" is Darren's debut predicting his iconic trademarks, where our subconscious affects our body, incapable of transcending its physical trap venting its anger on that same body responsible of so much pain, so much limitation. Mathematics are the cause and the solution of the torment, but like God, they're too perfect to be reached, you can tend to, but never touch them. I love maths, I love cinema, I could not not love Darren Aronofsky's masterpiece "Pi"