Director Darren Aronofksy Offers Up A Slice Of The Unconventional With This Pi

The 1990's saw a large number of great directors make their feature film debuts, particularly in the first half of the decade that saw the likes of Richard Linklater & Quentin Tarantino make their marks on the world of cinema. But that doesn't mean all the notable directorial debuts could be found in the first half of the 1990's since Wes Anderson leaped into the realm of feature films with 1996's Bottle Rocket while Darren Aronofsky entered feature-length filmmaking with his 1997 motion picture Pi, a film that certainly establishes a large number of the specific filmmaking traits many associate explicitly with Aronofsky to this very day.


Pi is all about Max Cohen (Sean Gullette), a super-genius dude who lives alone in a ratty apartment and finds solace from his recurring piercing headaches in numbers. This guy's got a real knack for mathematics and computers, which helps him to be on top of things like where the stock market is gonna go in the future. But Max has bigger fish to fry than just following how certain companies are performing on Wall Street. Max is actually convinced that he's oh so close to stumbling on an all-important 216-digit long number that could change the world as we all know it. In order to help discover this crucial number, Cohen accepts a microchip offered to him by some high-level Wall Street agents, who begin following him closely.

These aren't the only people around Max that have started to act weird ever since he started on this quest to discover this 216-digit number. His mentor, Sol Robeson (Mark Margolis), refuses to tell Max anything about the number he so desperately seeks beyond the fact that he should stop his hunt while a talkative fellow named Lenny Meyer (Ben Shenkman) begins to talk to Max on a regular basis so frequent that one begins to suspect that Lenny might have ulterior motives for Max in mind. Max's mind is already unstable as it is but now with everyone seemingly turning against him, he doesn't know what could possibly be in store for him next.

For his debut feature as a director, Darren Aronofsky (who, in addition to directing Pi, is also its sole writer) seems to be channeling films by Andrei Tarkovsky and David Lynch in making heavy use of unorthodox editing cues and stylized imagery in order to visually reinforce how fractured the mental state of our protagonist really is. That's an admirably bold aesthetic to channel for one's very first time directing a feature film and Pi makes good use of such unconventional tendencies in certain scenes, most notably in a sequence depicting the pain Max experiences whilst enduring a particularly harrowing headache.

The sound work (a frequently prominent part of Aronofsky's work) here in this scene alone is enough to get one on edge and discomforted while the accompanying camerawork and editing does a fine job of eschewing conventional filmmaking techniques in favor of putting one in the agony-ridden mindset of Max. Unfortunately, a number of other instances of more eccentric imagery in the story didn't quite jibe for me, there are too many of these avant-garde moments that aren't visually interesting enough or thematically potent enough to work properly. Far too often in Pi appearances of the strange or unusual just come off like subpar window dressing to spruce up a more shallow story than they do appropriate visual signifiers of how far gone Max's mind is.

When it comes to unusual visual traits found in Pi, more off-beat camerawork tends to work far more successfully and consistently at conveying a sense of unconventionality. Unfortunately, the performances are about as scattershot at achieving full-blown success as the attempts at unusual imagery, with Sean Gullette never quite creating a unique take on the isolated super-genius routine that could make the role feel alive, though it is a treat to see Aronofsky regular Mark Margolis A.K.A. Hector Salamanca in an entertaining supporting role. That enjoyable performance, as well as a well-paced script and the successful instances of bizarre & idiosyncratic filmmaking, do very much show the promise Darren Aronofsky had as a filmmaker in his first movie, though Pi certainly feels far more hit-and-miss than his more consistently engaging works.