Pi

When my parents came to visit to celebrate my father's birthday, my wife rented Pi, an "indie sci-fi" film as described by Netflix. When I used those two words to describe the movie, he said, "oh great, I've never seen an Indian science fiction movie!"

Pi was not made by Indians. And it's not really a science fiction movie. It's more of a weird fiction movie, extrapolating a single idea and obsessing over it. Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) is a brilliant, eccentric mathematician who is convinced he can apply the laws of mathematics to nature, and by proxy, the stock market. Since the stock market is a reflection of humanity, which is a reflection of nature, he believes there is a pattern that can be mathematically predicted. Predict the stock market and get rich, right?

From the beginning, we're never sure why Max wants so badly to pursue this path to power. Is he sick of being poor? Perhaps it's to succeed where his mentor, Sol Robenson (Mark Margolis), failed. Sol's stroke stopped him from puzzling out of the answer, which is precisely 216 characters long.

And so we have two philosophies that are actually one and the same: that mathematics of sufficient scope IS nature. Or in other words, the entire universe could be predicted if we just had enough computing power to handle it. Which could be interpreted as the definition of God. This dichotomy manifests as the Kabbalist Lenny Meyer (Ben Shenkman) on one side and the corporate goon Marcy Dawson (Pamela Hart) on the other. Meyer seeks to reclaim the connection with the heavens through the Tetragrammaton, the name of God, and he believes it's 216 characters long. Dawson just wants Max to figure out the secret of the stock market, presumably to make a lot of money. It's the old religion vs. science debate.

The stark black and white film further delineates Pi's either/or approach. It's so washed out that it begins to induce the migraines Max experiences as he gets ever closer to the truth. Aronofsky is a master of translating human misery through visceral images, and the whip-snapshot sequences of Requiem for a Dream's drug addiction are in full evidence here. Even the soundtrack sounds similar, which plucks at the nerve endings in your gums with ever-increasing urgency.

Pi isn't a bad film, but it's intellectually challenging. There's precious little science in Pi, or valid mathematics, or even an accurate portrayal of Kabablism. It uses artistic license to make its point -- that the nature of God is beyond human ken - and ultimately beats the viewer over the head with it in the end. Literally.