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By Bill Boisvert
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As if to compensate, movies usually tie intelligence to more colorful and histrionic personality quirks–to juvenile delinquence in Good Will Hunting, to autism in Rain Man, and to acute psychosis in , this summer’s “indie genius” movie. Max Cohen is a brilliant mathematician (we learn this right off the bat from a combined stunt calculation/testimonial scene in which a little girl with a calculator quizzes him in long division); he’s obsessed with finding the hidden pattern that governs everything in the universe–especially that most profound manifestation of cosmic order, the stock market. His quest seems to pay off when his computer screen briefly flashes a 216-digit number that enables it to predict stock prices, but the computer crashes and he loses all trace of the number. As Max struggles to reconstruct it, he suffers more and more intensely from symptoms of mental collapse–blinding headaches, blackouts, hallucinations, and a growing conviction that he’s the target of a conspiracy that wants his number for nefarious purposes.
This stylistic approach has some potential, with its tacit equation of mathematical genius and paranoid schizophrenia. After all, both mental states impose a seamless theoretical construct on the world, without compromises or exceptions: every number obeys the distributive law; everyone is out to get me. Perhaps the schizophrenic is only a more militant version of the mathematician, willing to upend reality for the sake of logical consistency. The parallel draws between the two is intriguing, revealing the tenuous equilibrium that keeps our rational mental faculties from freezing into a rictus of insanity.
Will represents a familiar American folk hero–the know-nothing–writ very large. His genius functions as supercharged common sense, working-class street smarts that encompass even the finer points of “combinatorial mathematics.” His brilliance gives him a direct, authentic understanding of the world, unmediated by institutions and free from the biases of received opinion. For him no question requires study or reflection; the answers are always obvious, straightforward, plain as the nose on your face. It’s the intellectuals who can’t see things straight, always fumbling around and fucking things up, always demanding to have shit explained to them. Their ideas are always blinkered by precedent, their research always perverted by sinister bureaucracies. He wants no part of it, Will rants to the stuffed shirts who would recruit him for the National Security Agency; after all, it’s blue-collar grunts like his buddies who always go to war to clean up after the Pentagon Poindexters.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Pi film still.
