Director: Darren Aranofsky. IMDb
Rating: ♥♥
Alternatively titled “Pi: Order in Chaos,” the movie looks at the odd and compelling relationship between the mathematical concept and the world it seems to emerge from. The story is about Max Cohen, a mathematician driven to understand the “order in chaos” which the value of pi comes to represent for him. He goes nuts in the course of the film, a schizophrenic who tries to retreat from human entanglements, only to become caught in a web of violence that others inflict on him and that ultimately he inflicts on himself.
None of which has much to do, ostensibly, with the pecularities of pi itself. The intriguing thing about the mathematics of pi is that the number emerges from the simplest of conceivable relationships: the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, and what could be more orderly than circles? Yet the decimal expansion of the number is a string of digits which seem to have no relation to each other: they are a random sequence. This strange fact suggests to Max, and to others in the movie, that the apparent chaos of the world (exemplified by the stock market) hides a deeper order within it, so if we could just discover the code of this deep order, the superficial appearance of chaos would be dispelled. In the movie, we are led to believe the code of this deep order is a 216-digit number.
But the movie is really about the dangers of obsession, isn’t it. Max achieves peace at the end when he gives up his obsession and allows the world to keep its secrets, allows the chaos to remain chaos, and accepts the beauty of what he finds in children, in the trees, in life. We are relieved to see Max at peace, but, after all this travail, we cannot believe that he has lost his mathematical genius, that the deep order is not there, and that pi is not a mystical key that points to the connection between all things. So the movie ends with a question. Thankfully it isn’t stated explicitly, because that would be a grade-B movie tactic. This movie is a bit better than that.
It is worth watching, because this movie, like glancing up at the stars on a cold December night, unexpectedly, while hurrying from the car to the house, can suddenly remind us that there are greater things in this world than our petty daily preoccupations. We need to be reminded of that every so often.
