Pi's marriage of the purely mathematical to the purely spiritual...

Rating: 10/10 (8 May 1999)

The mirror Pi. A sentient energy. This movie does what most truly great films can: turns a viewer's gaze on himself. What one sees he sees because it suits him; this is the consequence of the Interpretive Film's dance.
He is horrified, he is frazzled, he is awe-stricken. But why? Since the question will certainly differ--as a number of people will see a film--analyses will differ. It is no wonder a variety of opinions can emerge from a theatrical screening, not to mention multiple ones.
In my opinion another thing done right is Pi's marriage of the purely mathematical to the purely spiritual. It refuses to polarize at either and avoids a paradox of the sort found in bipartisan politics, or any instition founded on duality, which ignores the apparent oneness of things; of man's being the fountainhead, the outpouring, of the life force. And so Pi charges the viewer to look no further than himself, for answers.
It is no coincidence that Pi ends on an interpretive note.
My only direct reference to the film invokes the scene in which an ant is perched on the wall next to Max's stock ticker. I was reminded of some old textbook illustrations from school I've seen of prisms and their effects on light. The ant beside the ticker looks as thought it might be a prism, spewing forth information on stocks--the "living system" of which Max so often speaks--a kind of life force.
Therefore, it is this viewer's opinion that, symbolically, Max's committing suicide is a result of his inability to find answers within him--his persistence in trying to find them, externally, to such an extent that he forgets that he and his world ARE precisely the same energy--and a disastrous method of marrying himself to his world again.