Pi . Nashville Scene . 09-28-98

DIRECTED BY: Darren Aronofsky

REVIEWED: 09-28-98

If Good Will Hunting and Little Man Tate showed us anything, it's that filmmakers have a hell of a time explaining mathematical genius to us poor slobs in the aisle seats. Darren Aronofsky's sci-fi thriller Pi scoots around this problem by drawing us into the agitated awareness of a brilliant mathematician, Max (Sean Gullette), whose glimpse of a secret numerical order to the universe is wracking his body with blinding headaches and is riddling his mind with paranoia. As in most sci-fi thrillers, the paranoia is justified: A sinister Wall Street cabal and a team of Jewish mystics both want the 216-digit number that flashes teasingly on Max's computer.

Aronofsky is more concerned with the weight of the knowledge than the knowledge itself, which is a bit of a letdown: We wait to have our minds blown with the far-reaching consequences of the numerical pattern--surely that 216-digit whatsit has ramifications for people besides rabbis and stockbrokers--but the movie settles for lengthy chase scenes and nightmarish hallucinations. Thanks to Matthew Libatique's astonishing black-and-white cinematography, though, those scenes are kinetic as hell: They beat up on you with the same shaky amphetamine-freak terror and flesh-metal imagery as the Japanese Tetsuo movies.

Aronofsky plainly has talent, but his resolution is way too conventional for the kind of sound and fury he's packing. It's pretty hooty when you pass through all that cyberpunk intensity and assaultive electronica, and you're left with the dullest of drive-in morals: "There are some things man was not meant to know." (The movie's not terribly different from the Roger Corman vehicle X--The Man With the X-Ray Eyes, right down to the if-thine-eye-offends-thee ending.) Unlike the mystifying number at its core, Pi adds up to much less than the sum of its admittedly dazzling parts.

--Jim Ridley

Full Length Reviews
Pi
Pi
Pi

Capsule Reviews
Pi
Pi

Film Vault Suggested Links
Somewhere in the City
Deep in the Heart (of Texas)
The Acid House

Rate this Film
If you don't want to vote on a film yet, and would like to know how others voted, leave the rating selection as "Vote Here" and then click the Cast Vote button.