Jim Carrey is an actor who divides opinion at the best of times - many people can't see past his early rubber-faced idiocy in the Ace Ventura films, while others cite The Truman Show as classic modern satire of our TV nation.I guess I fall somewhere in the middle, but The Number 23 certainly has to be one of his darker, more powerful performances - there aren't many laughs in this Fortean murder mystery.
Once you get past the flawed central conceit of the 'power of the number 23' through its selective use of pattern recognition; the film becomes a wonderfully complex - almost Ouroboros-like - tale of a man given a book that seems to shadow his own life story.
He - Walter Sparrow (Carrey) - then becomes obsessed, as the characters in the book do, with finding occurrences of the number 23 (from bus and car numbers, to houses and dates etc etc).
It's a powerful idea yet the human mind is particularly adept at finding patterns where there are none, and ultimately the audience is left to make up their own mind: do these patterns really exist and have significance or are they all coincidences given meaning only by Walter?
From a secondary school-era interest in the Illumuniati and their own particular numerological 'codes' (in that it was the number 'five', which is, of course just 2 + 3!) I've always found this particular brand of conspiracy theory fascinating, so I was willing to be a less critical of The Number 23 than I think a lot of people were when it was released at the cinema (on February 23).
It's not the most original of stories - although mentioning similar films will possibly give away the twists - but it's directed with surprising style and taste by Joel Schumacher with strong central performances from Carrey and Virginia Madsen as his long-suffering wife.
Interesting "Beyond The Movie" extras on the DVD feature a collection of talking heads that range from mathematicians on the beauty and 'magic' (in the "isn't that sunset magical?" way rather than the Harry Potter sense) of numbers and science; the filmmakers on how quirky superstitions like the '23 enigma' make for good story material; a psychologist on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and a couple of deluded, New Age numerologists spouting utter, unsubstantiated B.S. about the significance of numbers and patterns as though it were cold, hard fact. A fun, but not revelatory, ensemble.
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