Aditya Shevade

Pi

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Continuing from the last post about nothing, this is a review of the movie Pi. No, not American Pie. The mathematical Pi. Released in 1998, Pi was director Darren Aronofsky‘s first film which won him a few awards. A relatively low budget movie with unknown stars and a weird setting. The movie was shot with an extremely high grain, high contrast black and white film. This is one of the reasons I love it. It feels weird and it really is.

The narrator of the story is Max Cohen. A number theorist Max believes that the world around us can be explained with numbers alone. He thinks everything is a mathematical model. Everything is governed by a deterministic function. You can tell when a passion turns into an obsession. As soon as that hint of obsession is observed, things begin to get interesting.

Max is brilliant. A gifted mathematician who is capable of doing number manipulations in his head without the need of a calculator. His neighbor, a little girl, plays with him by asking him to do large calculations in his head which he does before the calculator – you remember the old calculators I hope, the ones which used to take several seconds to compute operations like square root. This guy is faster than those, and he’s correct.

Max calls his computer Euclid. His sole aim in life is to find a unifying calculation to predict the behavior of the stock market. Seems interesting right? Every broker on the Wall Street would be after this guy if he were to succeed. Max made Euclid work and chunk out a number which he later discarded only to find out next day that Euclid predicted the pick spot on. Euclid eventually crashed. Max’s suffering from headaches, social anxiety, hypertension. Max’s only contact with the outside world warns him to stop and take a break – he doesn’t. Max eventually meets Lenny at a coffee shop, a Jew interested in Torah. Max is, as you predicted correctly, approached by Wall Street agents.

What do they want with Max? Will Max be able to find what he is looking for? Will Euclid survive the initial crash and give Max what he wants? With ever so increasing headaches, hallucinations, the painkillers, the numbers – will it get to Max? Will Max be able to go through this without going mad? Will Sol, his mentor, be able to put an end to his obsession? The movie is a pure genius. The high grain film, the handheld cameras, blotched out images – it brings out the creativity of Aronfosky. The movie can leave a lasting impact on you and leave you wanting for more.