Cocaine Pi

Rating: Null/10 (12 August 2001)

There is already a glut of films on drug addiction. Filmmakers love this subject just as actors love to play mentally handicapped characters. In a comment on one of them, I plan to provide a survey of this and how addiction of the subject feeds the addiction it depicts. But not here, because what is interesting about this film is not that Aronofsky started with a notion of a world and might have successfully portrayed it. Rather the interesting thing is that he has a particular style of film-making that seems inflexible, and his problem is to find that one subject that is apt for the style.
Consider Terry Gilliam, the visual pythonista. He's very talented in creating quirky worlds with odd juxtapositions of props and sets. And he understands self-reference, the type found in British humor. But his overall sense of profundity is thin, and his mastery of narrative immature. So while his films are interesting in the sense that unlikely accidents attract attention, they are generally disappointing and messy. That is, until 'Fear and Loathing.' That's because the drugged mind is precisely composed of odd juxtapositions and weak profundities. And Gilliam's sense of self-reference (aided by Depp) is able to combine his condition with Hunter's. It works; it works well.
Now turn to Aronofsky. He comes from a different visual tradition, one where slicing and dicing is the rule. Its not so much what the camera sees but how it sees it that is important. His first product: 'Pi,' was a spectacular mess. That's because he assumed that mathematically induced hallucinations were something drug-like, and that mathematics was arithmetic, and that the connection between mystical cosmologies and axiomatic dissonance was something simple. No one noticed the lemonade-stand approach, because there may only be a couple dozen people alive who know uncontrolled mathematical visual worlds, and there is scant literature on this to be found.
Here, he turns to something that everyone thinks they know: simple erosion of the mind and will from drugs. Here, his cinematic approach is more apt. He shuffles, he jiggles and follows, he splits, he injects a repeating snap when the character does. Burstyn does an Emily Watson and completely bares her pathetic soul, and we are shocked at the supposed cost to her personally. The camera does succeed in intensifying the documentary feel, so the blur between character and actor is increased.
So both Aronofsky and Gilliam have now produced, with the aid of talented performers, the one decent film their styles can accommodate unless they mature. What then? Well, in Aronofsky's case, it could be to develop the other thing he has done here -- he has created a somewhat masterful narrative of frustrated dreams. Personally, I prefer the understatement of 'Stranger than Paradise,' to the continual beating of the obvious we have here. But the self-referential notion of the fabricated TeeVee image defining this woman's hopes, mirrored by the similarly fabricated Movee image defining (not merely reporting) the loss of those hopes shows a promising narrative mastery.
Let's hope he works on that for a few films and takes the Ridley Scott approach to growth on the cinematic side: do stuff you don't understand and develop the ability to adapt the vision to the narrative, not the other around. Not the other way around.