A Flawed Look at the Madness of Obsession

Rating: 7/10 (25 April 2020)

I'm a big Darren Aronofsky fan. I have been ever since I saw The Fountain fourteen years ago, and it completely revolutionised what I thought movies were capable of. I often credit it with making me the movie buff I am today. Since then I have watched every single Aronofsky movie, and largely loved all of them. Except Pi, his feature-length debut (and his early shorts). This was mainly because I just couldn't find it anywhere, and when I could it was priced so far out of what was reasonable. I became resigned to the fact it was probably going to be a movie I'll never see. Thank you Amazon for having it available on Prime video.
Pi follows Max, a man obsessed with predicting the stock market. He's convinced there's mathematical patterns in everything. During one particular prediction session, his homemade supercomputer crashes after spitting out a 216-digit number. He thinks nothing of it, throws the print-out away, and gets to fixing his computer ready for next time. But it's not long before other people start mentioning a mysterious 216-digit number that could solve the mystery to everything. His mentor mentions the same thing occurred with his computer, and theorised that it found a brief moment of self-awareness before sputtering out. A guy in a coffee shop shows Max a secret code in the Torah, and posits that the key to God is a 216-digit in the religious texts. All the while there's a mysterious Wall Street woman who keeps hounding him to crack it and give them what they need to make a lot of money off the stock market.
But there's a catch. Max is not mentally well. He suffers cluster headaches and requires medication to keep them under control. As the movie progresses his mental state deteriorates and he starts hallucinating. It starts to question his reliability as a narrator. Is he a mathematical genius, or just a paranoid schizophrenic with delusion of grandeur? Is the Wall Street woman real or just an aggressive delusion of being followed? Is there really a 216-digit code in the Torah, or is Max just finding patterns and coincidences where there aren't any? Pi evolves into a movie as much about mental illness as it does about unlocking the secrets to the universe by a mathematical pattern.
As an Aronofsky aficionado, possibly my favourite thing about watching this movie was seeing where his director tropes and trademarks all began. There's an element of Pi in all his movies, from the fascination with biblical topics (Noah, mother!), to a descent into madness and a depressing ending (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan), to a search for something beyond human comprehension (The Fountain), to following a single character intimately as they break down (The Wrestler). It's all here. Even filming techniques like relentless close-ups, quick cuts, and a distraction to inanimate objects. Pi has it all. It feels as much like an Aronofsky movie as any other, almost like there was no filmmaking voice for him to find; it's all been there since the beginning.
But. But Pi probably ranks as my least favourite Aronofsky movie, for one very simple reason. It's an ugly movie to look at. I understand the reasoning behind it, for sure, but for me it got in the way of the viewing experience rather than enhanced it. Pi is filmed entirely in black and white, with the contrast dialed all the way up. There's barely any grey, there's either light or shadow. It works as an insight into Max's binary state of mind. The world to him is black and white. There's a pattern to it and it can be cracked. But from a moviemaking perspective, it blots out the details. It makes it hard to discern exactly what you're looking at, and causes the film's more frenetic moments to just turn into an indecipherable blur. It wouldn't have been so bad if there wasn't a thick layer of grain over the top of everything, muddying an already lacklustre visual quality. Again it's meant to bring us into Max's world, and be reminiscent of old science experiment footage, but ultimately it just made it harder to watch, in a literal sense. As a counterpoint, Beyond the Black Rainbow sought out the same visual techniques in it's psychedelic sections, but succeeded at it because it didn't get in the way of what was being shown. It remained grainy enough to feel old and creepy, but crisp enough that you could see what was happening, and its use of high-contrast black and white was used to create abstract shapes rather than muddy the details of something we're meant to recognise.
Another slight niggle with Pi was the acting quality. For what was ultimately an amateur film, I can't slate it too hard, but the acting performances often come off as first year acting school performances. Sean Gullette shows an apt awkwardness as Max, but often it comes out in the wrong way, delivering lines awkwardly as if he's forgotten them, or is unintentionally unsure what to do with his body. Pamela Hart as the Wall Street woman just feels incredibly off and unnatural, and Samia Shoaib as Max's neighbour looks like she was plucked out of acting school and was trying too hard to make an impression. Mark Margolis and Ben Shenkman are pretty good as the mentor and Jewish guy respectively, so it's no surprise to see them still working today, but Margolis was already an established actor going into this anyway.
I am glad I watched Pi, but only to see where it all started for Aronofsky. I enjoyed the story that was being told, and while it's a story that has been done a number of times, Pi found an interesting way to tie it all together and really delve into the insanity this kind of obsession can cause (or the insanity that causes this kind of obsession). The soundtrack is also great, fast-paced and rhythmic mirroring not only Max's frantic state, but also his search for patterns and repetition in everything. Using tracks from the likes of Orbital, Aphex Twin, Massive Attack, and composer Clint Mansell, it makes a surprisingly cohesive soundtrack to listen to on its own terms as well. The acting was awkward but I can forgive that considering the budget and it being a first time, self-financed indie project. But what ultimately let it down for me was the ugly visual aesthetic that often made it too hard to actually discern what was going on. It worked thematically, but just didn't work for me. I give Pi a 7/10; solid, but let down by some superfluous issues.