York Square's 'Pi' leaves behind a bad taste

Darren Aronofsky's Pi is the story of Maximilian Cohen (Sean Gullette), a reclusive number theorist who is plagued by chronic migraine headaches. Max believes in math as the new religion and yearns to uncover the secrets of the universe. He bel-ieves these enigmas lie hidden behind the 16th letter of the Greek alphabet, Pi--the mathematical symbol which represents the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.

COURTESY ARTISAN Watch your back, Max, these Hasidim won't take no for an answer!

At the start of the film, we find Max sequestered in his lonely Chinatown apartment using a computer program he created to predict the ups and downs of the stock market. Mind you, Max has not created the program for his own monetary gain. No, a tormented genius like Max seeks only to prove his point: that there are patterns everywhere in nature, that at the heart of everything--ourselves and the universe--there is math, and that therefore math is also at the heart of everything we create.

As Max pushes himself harder and harder, getting closer and closer to accurate predictions of tomorrow's stock quotes, his migraines become increasingly frequent, and the pain he suffers more and more intense. Though warned of the dangers of burnout by his friend and mentor, Sol, an older number theorist who suffered a crippling stroke years earlier while also attempting to uncover the secrets of Pi, Max presses on, more determined than ever to reach his goal.

Then, during a particularly monotonous research session, Max's computer bites the dust, spitting out a 216-digit number before frying its chips into a sticky goo. Max is unsure of the number's meaning and worries that any better understanding of it may cripple him as number theory did Sol, or kill him as it did his computer.

Nevertheless, Max becomes a target overnight. Both a government agency who wishes to control the stock market and a handful of rather violent Hasidic Jews who believe that the number is a message from God desperately want Max to hand over the secret of Pi, and will stop at nothing to get it.

The most notable aspect of Pi is without a doubt the simple and expressive camera work that Aron-ofsky employs. He has chosen to alternate between using a hand-held camera and a not-so-steady steady-cam to shoot the film in high-contrast 16mm black and white. The audience is made to understand the nature of Max's obsession through the cutaway shots of everyday things--curling cigarette smoke, cream mixing into coffee, a wave-polished seashell. As the film continues, we see that math governs our universe in ways we probably will never understand.

Unfortunately, as the film reaches its climax and begins to take on a more frenetic pace, the simple elegance of the visuals deteriorates into the mundanity of your average Prodigy video. Ultimately, Pi most closely resembles an overstylized music video--jumpy and often confusing editing, overabundant use of the cutaway shot, and one just plain bad soundtrack (Clint Mansell of Pop Will Eat Itself contributes his brand of mind-numbing "electronica").

Shots of Leonardo da Vinci paintings, scurrying ants, phrenology books, and shattered mirrors litter the screen, reminding us that the thin and blurry line between art and the Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" video is easily crossed.

The dialogue is mediocre at best, and downright awful in parts, with such gems as "Survival of the fittest, Max, and we have the fucking guns!" There's no chemistry between the characters and the plot is sorely lacking. At its core, the film is really nothing more than another all-too-paranoid episode of The X-Files, complete with a mysterious scar behind Max's ear and a host of bizarre reappearing characters like "bloody hand man" and "the subway gawker."

The only thing that distinguishes Pi from MTV is its pretension of being a "smart" movie. Unfortunately, Aronofsky tries to achieve this goal through little more than filming in black and white, dealing with math and religion, and casting a bunch of unknowns.

To its credit, there are rare moments when Pi shines, but the only real pattern in the movie is that sometime somewhere before, you've seen it all.

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• The official site for Pi