Inspired, but rough around the edges

Rating: 7/10 (19 July 2007)

WARNING - THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR ALL SECTIONS OF THE PLOT, INCLUDING THE ENDING.
It wasn't long after I started school that I realised that Maths was a blind alley for me. I've taken the Humanities route, and my numerical skills consist of the basic mental arithmetic needed to live in the real world. In many ways that puts me in a good position to appreciate a film like Pi, because I can analyse it as a film while the alleged flaws in its premise go right over my head. So the 216-digit number is actually a 218-digit one, but unless I'm going to freeze-frame and actually count then that makes no difference to the narrative at all. Its take on Kabbalah is skewed? I don't know any better. So as far as I'm concerned the premise is fairly solid, if only because I'm prepared to take their word for it that the Fibonacci sequence is A over who-knows-what.
In some respects Pi can ride on visuals alone: the grainy black-and-white points to an extremely self-conscious low-fi ethos, which seems to glory in the knowledge that it would never happen in Hollywood, but the high-contrast effect looks fantastic and the direction is watertight: Pi takes place in a claustrophobic environment where your choice is to melt away into dark shadow or step into the light and fry in its glare. The characters are trapped in a world coiled in on itself: Max (Sean Gullette), the mathematical genius, sits inside his tangled supercomputer Euclid (literally), which itself sits inside the stock market, which is in turn the product of the human race working together, which exists on a planet governed by the patterns of nature, which exists in a universe governed by the laws of physics, and so on into infinity. Searching for a clue as to the nature of it all, Max is struggling to escape his place, and as such is as much a bug as the ones that literally crawl over Euclid. If he breaks his place in sequence, the sequence collapses.
The plot concerns Max's quest to find out the secrets of a 216-digit number that Euclid spontaneously spits at him, before making impossibly accurate stock market predictions and finally crashing. People want that number: it might contain the key to understanding the entire universe, but the more Max learns about it, the more his own mental instability tears that universe apart. Gleefully destroying the boundary between reality and fantasy, the idea that there might be pattern to it all becomes increasingly absurd. The pattern eventually becomes irrelevant, overtaken by the importance of Max's perception of the world around him.
The film takes for granted, as its premise, that there is a pattern governing everything. But that isn't the point: the point is whether humanity is capable of understanding it, whether it needs to know it, or whether it is getting above itself by trying to find it. The only person Max can talk to about this is his elderly mentor Sol (Mark Margolis) over repeated games of Go  one of the film's better-used symbolic motifs. Sol has a much more laid-back attitude to life, but it is implied that he has previously encountered the number before and that he knows something of its true nature. The Go board is a microcosm of the universe, which Max sees as another example of the universal spiral: apparently simple, then incredibly complicated, but ultimately governed by a pattern. Max does not assert that there is a pattern to the game because he has found one, but because logic seems to dictate that one must exist, and it is in that same gap where something should exist only because of what's around it that the Jewish cult finds its own meaning. This is in some respects an answer to the accusation that the film's premise is implausible: it deals with something that the brain is not meant to comprehend, and it places that incomprehension at its heart, not the pattern.
It isn't a perfect film. Some of the symbolism is very obvious (Euclid's bugs, in the form of an ant infestation); the end is an old art-film cliché (wait  you're telling me it might not literally be happening? Whoa!) and some of the dialogue is very corny. How many movie villains have ranted about "survival of the fittest" before pulling the trigger, for example? Or, more accurately, before the hero is whisked to safety at the last minute? I wouldn't hold it against anyone who finds the end unsatisfying, since everything we learn about the number is vague and ambiguous and leads to more questions. The end isn't about the mysteries of nature being returned to nature; it's about Max finally being satisfied that they are always going to remain as mysterious as ever, whatever glimpse of some bigger truth occasionally slips through the cracks. It was the quest that made Max important, and the film ends with him finally understanding that the conclusions are irrelevant because he was never going to reach them.