The movie’s alternating settings — weekdays on MIT’s campus and weekends spent loitering in Vegas casinos — results in unavoidable rollercoaster pacing that stifles any attempts at creating emotional footing during manic peaks (Vegas) and depressive valleys (MIT campus). The story arc is punctured because of Ben’s affected voice-over narration, recalling his fictional mentor, Spacey, in real life (“Presenting the 2008 Honda Accord.”) — like he’s following the smug actor’s product endorsing footsteps: “I had saved over $100,000. Only $200,000 to go.” Rather than coloring in off-screen gaps, the narration elementarily summarizes the action occurring on screen. Imagining its absence, it’s glaringly obvious that the character, and the larger events of which he is a key player, are in no way elucidated by it.
The movie’s most electric scene, set back in the Harvard classroom, following a falling out between Ben and Prof Rosa that finds Ben penniless again, is one in which the pair confront each other through euphemistic double speak in a populated classroom. The lecture concerns real life mathematician Cauchy — a pioneer in calculus analysis — and positing that he is believed to have stolen his influential theorems from his star student. As Ben explains, Cauchy used his students for their brilliance, discredited them, and stole their equations. A sage Rosa counters he shouldn’t have crossed Cauchy because they could have done great things together. True in life then, as in art now.
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