Negative Capability

Rating: 8/10 (26 December 2006)

Max is an obsessed genius falling ever more deeply into migraine-ridden madness. As he himself suggests, his life has been about staring into the sun. What makes this film so powerful is its unflinching first person point of view as Max follows his harrowing path. Director Aronofsky's camera assaults us with starkly lit, B&W images that heighten characterization and sometimes strobe and make moires that blind us; the sounds often disengage us from the images, while film editing dislocates time. From the first moments of the film we are Max; his alienation is palpable, sometimes the pulsing of his nausea is as well.
This ride is harrowing, and not just the horror scenes, so much so that some will be put off. For me it is cinema at its most cinematic. Aronofsky makes Max's mental state palpable through cinematography. As Max spirals into self-destruction he also reaches for the mathematical beauty, the pattern that underlies all the forms in the universe. This opens the cinematography to a wonderful range of imagery handled so as to leave the audience to ponder possible symbolic resonances. The final beauty of the film rests in the fact that this is a tale told by a hallucinating madman. We may think we know what is real and what is his hallucination. Then again, most of us have awakened from nightmares unsure where dream stops and reality begins. This leaves fundamental questions of the film interestingly ambiguous: Is it the mathematical vision that short circuits Max's brain or is it all those drugs he's taking? Is that strange computer rig that envelopes his apartment a machine for solving fundamental questions, or is it merely the externalization of Max's agoraphobic, claustrophobic mindscape? Is the universe based on fundamental order or is the order Max sees merely the shape of chaos? The film does no more than pose the question.