If you're an MTV airhead, stay away.

Rating: Null/10 (11 February 2007)

This fascinating low-budget movie is about - well - the meaning of life in a sense. The main character, Max, is a semi-mad loner, a mathematic genius whose life's obsession is to sort out the chaos that is the universe in a coherent mathematical, that is to say, numerical - to him understandable - fashion. He doesn't have sex and he doesn't socialize; in fact, any contact with humans other than the old man - mentor? - is merely a waste of time and a triviality he would very well gladly do without entirely. The friendly chatter which his attractive Indian neighbour tries to repeatedly initiate falls on deaf ears. The little Asian girl that tests his computing skills he only affably tolerates possibly because she talks numbers with him and not so much because she is an innocent child.
The first thing he informs us is that he's had headaches ever since regaining his sight after having briefly lost it at the age of six when he starred directly at the sun in spite of being warned not to by his mother. It is to be assumed that from that point onwards his mind, his life, was focused on only one thing: to figure it all out. He later adds that he recalls as he starred at the sun that he saw a pattern or something, that what he saw made sense in a way and that he wanted to understand it better - whatever "it" was. The headaches are to be interpreted as the result of his (growing) frustration in failing to get to "the answer" i.e. the number or pattern. His obsession and the resulting thousands of hours of work and energy that he has invested in exploring the world of numbers - particularly as they relate to the "pi" value and spirals - has turned him into a mental mess. He consumes huge amounts of medication to fight the migraine, the shakes and God knows what else. His single-mindedness and rigid focus on finding the truth of all truths is increasingly bringing him to the very verge of total insanity.
His dogmatic refusal to accept the world as a place of chaos which neither he nor anyone else can fully or even partially control lead him to the idea that there is an inherent order in the universe and that it - like absolutely everything else - is based on clean and understandable numerical laws and principles. It isn't a coincidence that it was a look at the Sun that triggered this in him; the Sun is round after all, the symbol of life (on Earth, at least) and the "pi" value - which is something mathematicians have been working on for centuries - is related to the computation of a circle. He refuses to accept the existence of a world in which there is no order - however blurry and elusive that order may be. He believes that he will get to that number - which he finds out consists of a sequence of 216 numbers - best by analyzing the world stock markets, and later even the numerical significance of texts in the Torah. And as he gets closer to the truth/the number/the pattern i.e. to giving order a name, or a numerical value to the (non)chaos, ironically his own life gets increasingly chaotic: he suffers illusions, the old man gets a stroke, the fanatical Jewish organization is after him, the stock-broker firm is after him, the attacks get worse, etc. In the subway-station hallucination he sees a brain and he instinctively wants to poke it with a pen; this is perhaps subject to free interpretation, but I believe that this is his sub-conscious wish to lobotomize himself, i.e. free himself from the miserable, manic, and uncomfortable existence which has been torturing his mind (and body) for so long. There is an implied, certain amount of self-hate in him; he hates the (dominant) part of him which seeks this number. His old friend, it seems, knows more about Max's quest than he'd admit, because he was there once, too. He warns Max about continuing his search; he tells him that it's both futile and leads to self-destruction. But self-destruction or at least the sort-of lobotomical self-destruction is perhaps what Max wants. He seeks the answer so that he can finally rest.
The old man eventually (apparently) finds the (series of) number(s) and dies(?) from a second stroke. Max takes the paper with the figures and goes completely mad. In one of the final scenes he undergoes an almost religious experience in which he, well, sees the light - literally. This is entirely free for interpretation. A religious person will say that he has seen God, whereas an atheist like myself will say that he underwent something remotely comparable to what Dave undergoes in the last half-hour of "2001"; i.e. that he has gotten insight into the secret(s) of the universe, that he has finally learned how the chaos is controlled - or not controlled as may be the case. In the end, he performs a quasi lobotomy on himself, rather unsubtly with a drill. Again, why he does this may or may not be obvious. I believe that he found the truth and that it was so overwhelming - in a positive or negative way (or maybe even both) - that he, as a mere human, couldn't handle it. So he took his genius, and perhaps this knowledge away from him with the drill. The last scene in the park shows the Asian girl asking him her usual mathematical questions. Max says he doesn't know the answer to the first one. The second is to divide 748 by 238. He doesn't say anything, but merely looks up at the sky (or Sun). Of course, the answer to this is 3.14...