Alternate Best Actor 1998: Sean Gullette in Pi

Sean Gullette did not receive an Oscar nomination for portraying Maximillian "Max" Cohen in Pi.

Pi follows a man trying to make sense of the universe through mathematics which slowly drives him mad. 

Pi is an ambitious filmmaker's first film which comes with a few different things typically, including a lead actor who may or may not be part of their ongoing filmography. Sometimes you have a Harvey Keitel, where a great actor begins with a great filmmaker, sometimes, not quite so much. And I'll say Pi falls into the latter with Sean Gullette in the lead role as the mathematician whose obsession with numbers goes to biblical levels. Gullette's performance for much of the film is fairly one note of this sort of generalized paranoid intensity in and around everything. He doesn't really change much between his performances whether he is talking to his mentor (Mark Margolis who is the best part of the film), random people wanting to exploit him along the way, or random orthodox Jewish men who play into his math mania. Gullette certainly carries that intensity well enough, but I wouldn't say there are any great layers to his work. He keeps a very similar manner with just staring as though he's constantly thinking about his quest, and is a bit limiting for the character. He doesn't quite invite us in so to speak by building towards the paranoia, he's basically there the whole time, and the film just progresses from there from scene to scene. Gullette often is just kind of an aspect in what Aronofsky is doing, a bit like Jack Nance in Eraserhead, however I both prefer Nance and Eraserhead on the whole than Gullette's whose performance does feel a tad similar to. Gullette's work does eventually shift in the third act when everything in the film seems to be building in intensity as everyone seems to want a piece of his mind and his obsession only gets that more vicious. Unfortunately to me that just led Gullette to kind of start yelling all of his lines, again not with layers within the yelling just to tell us that the man is at an extreme and little more than that. I wouldn't say he's bad, it works up until a point, but again it doesn't make us feel as though there is a true progression here, more of a jump, making so a big shocking moment for the character at the end, just feels like something that happens rather than one more step towards insanity. Gullette doesn't give a bad performance, but he doesn't give a great one either. He very much just feels part of Aronofsky's vision that doesn't have life beyond that to any notable extent. He exists in this state of extreme, which again is a note that one can make magic out if one delivers a true greatness, but this isn't that performance.