Pi [DVD]

Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) is a brilliant Jewish mathematician who has spent ten years of his life attempting to uncover the numerical pattern underlying the ordered chaos of the stock market. Max, who faces near-madness because of recurring debilitating seizures, finds himself mysteriously pursued by a Wall Street financier, and by a Hassidic Jewish group who believe that his mathematical work will assist them bring about the Messianic Age as ordained by the mysteries of the Cabalah. As he comes close to understanding chaos, Max finds his life and the very nature of his existence threatened by both the profanity of the capitalists and the sacred intentions of the Jewish Cabalistic cult. “Pi” owes a great debt the fevered imaginative writing of the Czech-Jewish writer, Franz Kafka. Just as in Kafka the madness of the individual cannot be separated from the madness of the world around him, so in “Pi”, Max’s fear of insanity is made more unbearable by the urban bleakness of New York City. The filmmakers also owe a debt to the existential visual and aural pioneering work of David Lynch: the stark black and white cinematography and the acidic techno score by Clint Mansell wonderfully accentuate the hallucinogenic intensity of the film. Philosophical, technically brilliant and economical in both execution and length, “Pi” is movie that explores one of the pivotal questions of contemporary human existence: are sacred and scientific aspirations completely antithetical? For all the dark intensity of the themes, “Pi” emerges as a strangely hopeful film.