Product Details

• Actors: Sean Gullette, Mark Margolis, Ben Shenkman, Pamela Hart, Stephen Pearlman
• Directors: Darren Aronofsky
• Writers: Sean Gullette, Darren Aronofsky, Eric Watson
• Producers: David Godbout, Eric Watson, Jonah Smith, Katie King
• Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Dolby, Letterboxed, NTSC, Widescreen
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround)
• Subtitles: English, Spanish
• Dubbed: French, Spanish
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Studio: Lions Gate
• DVD Release Date: January 12, 1999
• Run Time: 84 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (632 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 078401213X
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #13,794 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• Learn more about "Pi" on IMDb

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Patterns exist everywhere: in nature, in science, in religion, in business. Max Cohen (played hauntingly by Sean Gullette) is a mathematician searching for these patterns in everything. Yet, he's not the only one, and everyone from Wall Street investors, looking to break the market, to Hasidic Jews, searching for the 216-digit number that reveals the true name of God, are trying to get their hands on Max. This dark, low-budget film was shot in black and white by director Darren Aronofsky. With eerie music, voice-overs, and overt symbolism enhancing the somber mood, Aronofsky has created a disturbing look at the world. Max is deeply paranoid, holed up in his apartment with his computer Euclid, obsessively studying chaos theory. Blinding headaches and hallucinogenic visions only feed his paranoia as he attempts to remain aloof from the world, venturing out only to meet his mentor, Sol Robeson (Mark Margolis), who for some mysterious reason feels Max should take a break from his research. This movie is complex--occasionally too complex--but the psychological drama and the loose sci-fi elements make this a worthwhile, albeit consuming, watch. Pi won the Director's Award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. --Jenny Brown

Product Description

Sean Gulette, Ben Shenkman. A man searching for an all-important mathematical code is hounded by a Wall Street firm and a Hasidic group-all of whom think he is on to something. 1998/b&w/97 min/R/widescreen.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

166 of 180 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Calculus of Disbelief March 2, 2002

By Marc Ruby™ HALL OF FAMEVINE™ VOICE

Format:DVD|Amazon Verified Purchase

It is a remarkable surprise that, in a time of science fiction and fantasy films which continually strive do outdo each other in pyrotechnics, one of the best science fiction films I've seen is a little black & white masterpiece that was shot with a $60,000 budget. Darren Aronofsky, writer and director of 'PI', has created a film that is every bit as engaging as its 'big' brothers - in reality, even more so.

Mathematician Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) is on a quest. He is convinced that underlying the chaos of the stock market is a pristine order, a mathematical rule with which he can prove that everything can be reduced to numbers. His mentor and teacher is Sol Robeson (Mark Margolis), who was forced to give up his own investigations into PI when he suffered a mysterious stroke.

Cohen's investigation takes him far beyond the gyrations of the stock market into the mystical Kaballah and an intense questioning of the basic nature of reality. His tool for this journey is the silent, inanimate computer, Euclid, who seems to deconstruct Cohen's universe further with each strike of the return key. Even when Robeson urges Cohen to take a break from a quest which is clearly destroying the mathematician, torturing him with horrific headaches and hallucinations, Max is unable to stop. He is drawn step by step into the irrevocable gap between the sacred and the mundane.

Made with reversal film which heightens the contrast between light and dark, the film provides a continuous flow of symbolic content which plays in harmony with the world of ideas from with it is drawn. Ants and electric drills, computer chips and the swirls of cream in a cup of coffee all seem to have otherworldly referents. Aronofsky and Gullette, by some strange archaic alchemy have managed to create the seeming of layer after layer of possible meaning. To me the film itself becomes a non-repeating pattern where chaos mimics reality.

This film satisfies on many levels, starting with a question, finding an answer, and then discovering the next question. It is visually brilliant. Film director Matthew Libatique proves himself a genius, and Matthew Maraffi's production design is amazing. Euclid is created out of scrap and loose parts, but manages to take on a full life of its own. The acting is simply perfect. This is a film for late night coffee house conversations, appealing to both the paranoid and the believer.

Notable additional contents of the DVD are two full length commentaries on the film one by Aronofsky and the other by Gullette. There is a section of outtakes, the film trailers and some other miscellany. Much recommended.

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars No Safety In Numbers February 9, 2001

By Phrodoe

Format:VHS Tape

Pi is one of the better independent low-budget films I've seen in the last couple of years. It's a strange, twisted, subversive film, which takes as its thesis the idea that it's possible to know too much, to ask too many questions, for one's own good. A good example is the troubled protagonist of Pi, played to chilling perfection by Sean Gullette, who struggles with both the outside world and himself in his quest for the ultimate knowledge -- an equation which will tie together everything, from the beginnings of the universe to the chaotic ups and downs of the stock market. He is spied upon by unnamed big business interests, hoping to cash in on the latter idea; he is spied upon by Hasidic Jews who hope to cash in on the former idea; both sets of spies add the perfect element of paranoia to the film, and convince you that there is far more going on here than meets the eye, far more going on than is being talked about. The ideas put forth in later scenes bear this out -- boy, do they! -- but I wouldn't want to spoil that for you. The events of Pi, especially in the later scenes, are so surprising that any discussion of the plot would be totally unfair -- like telling someone who hasn't seen Citizen Kane what Rosebud is. So instead I'll confine myself to theme and character, which are sort of intertwined in this film. Gullette's character is a genius mathematician (as you might expect), a child prodigy of sorts who has always, we are told by his narration, courted such dangerous ideas and notions...and has paid the price for his arrogance more than once. He suffers from migranes -- really serious, agonizing ones which give him nosebleeds and vicious hallucinations, and which no painkillers seem able to stop or tame. (In fact the depictions of the migranes are amongst the film's best sequences; I watched it with a friend of mine who suffers from such headaches, and he said that these scenes were pretty close to what he experienced, at least in the feeling those scenes evoked.) It is during or just after the onset of these migranes that Gullette's character seems to receive his greatest revelations and insights -- and here the filmmakers use a technique of showing bright light as the literal image of these insights, a bit of symbolism that is almost, but not quite, clumsy and overdone. I believe it's by their sheer conviction that it works that the filmmakers are able to pull it off at all. In fact, it's through the use of this symbolism (light=knowledge) that Pi does some of its best work. It's used to illustrate the thesis I mentioned earlier, that it's possible to want to know too much for one's own good; Gullette's character relates how as a child, he stared too long into the sun, possibly triggering his migranes and his gift for numbers at the same time...which is why both seem intertwined in his perceptions. The use of light in the migrane sequences, and Gullette's subsequent gifts of insight, not only are symbolic but provide foreshadowing -- is he staring into the sun again? If so, what damage will he do this time? And as the plot slowly reveals where it is going, those questions become not only more difficult to answer, but more unsettling to even ask.

Pi was shot in black and white, which I find entirely appropriate. The harsh images created by the cinematography are a perfect echo for the harsh story, spoken in a language of such harsh rhythms...like the song a puppet sings when it siezes the strings of its own puppeteer. It may take more than one viewing to get everything out of this film, because there's a lot packed into it...but the more you watch it, the more rewarding it is. I would heartily reccommend Pi to any lover of experimental film.

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Compelling Sci-Fi June 8, 2001

By "nospam"

Format:DVD

First, this film scores because it is a quality script with that does not even try for "Hollywood" style production. Second, this film meets one of my personal criteria for a very good to great film in that it offers filmmakers / photographers good content to dig into, admire and learn from. Shot in black and white, the film has a certain 1960's-frenzied cheez-sci-fi style (maybe it was the weird, buzzing ambient score?) to it, but not to such a degree that it gets in the way. The cinematography actually reminded me of some segments from "Fight Club", believe it or not. Other reviewers either liked or were turned off by the pseudo-math that supports the plot - one man's search for underlying order in a chaotic, apparently random universe. Simply put, one cannot tell if this search is a schizophrenic episode or the result of a man's mind trying to comprehend something it was not designed to. They missed the simple fact that this ambiguity drives the whole plot. Sean Gullette never gives us a clue as to whether he's a genius or an annoying axe-grinder convinced that JFK was assassinated by the Moonies / "Blue Blockers" are a government mind-control device / there is an underlying, absolute, predictable order to the universe. Okay, just #3, but still... Gullette's performance, especially in "wing nut" mode, is great. By the end, he's shaved his head and recollects the best of Robert DeNiro in "Taxi Driver" in his intensity, although his character is not required to jump off a personal cliff quite so high as DeNiro's. Like all great films, this one leaves audiences with more questions than answers. As an added benefit, the math, while simple, is presented in such a way that anyone could see what might compel a person to spend their lives studying abstract number theory. The only thing that keeps me from giving 4-5 stars is that this film is work to watch - it is NOT "entertainment" per se, and people shopping for "entertainment" tend to focus on "# stars (x out of y)" as criteria. If that's you, forget it. For the adventurous film fan, it's a worthy film.