The Number 23

February 3. Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey) is late for his own birthday date. Which means his wife Agatha (Virginia Madsen) has time to kill. She wanders into a bookstore, 'A Novel Fate', and idly picks up a self-published manuscript by one Topsy Kretts: 'The Number 23', a novel of obsession. When Walter reads it he can't believe it. Here, in the guise of a pulp detective mystery, is the story of his life. The trouble is, the book's hero, 'Fingerling', becomes so obsessed with the number 23 he completely loses the plot and murders his lover, Fabrizia. Now that Walter thinks of it, 23 figures large in his own life too�

So what is it with 23? Alistair Crowley and William S Burroughs both singled it out, and Robert Anton Wilson has written about 'The 23 Enigma', which points to its seemingly high recurrence in patterns of science and history. A quick Google search will throw up all manner of coincidences, from 9/11 (9+11+2+0+0+1=23) to Shakespeare's date of birth and date of death. The earth's axis is on a 23-degree tilt; each parent contributes 23 chromosomes to a child; and 2 divided by 3 gives you .666 recurring. The Mayans believed the world will come to an end, December 23, 2012 (20+1+2=23). Makes you think, dunnit?

There is a (fairly) rational explanation. Because 23 is a prime number made up of the two lowest prime numbers (which add up to another prime and which are also frequently recurring factors in their own right) it lends itself to equations which rationalize the most spurious connections. In the movie, for instance, the colour pink is given a numerical value of 23 through a calculation I won't attempt to replicate here. That way madness lies.

Directed by the dread Joel Schumacher (Batman and Robin; The Phantom of Opera), The Number 23 pitches for Jacob's Ladder territory, with Walter drawn inexorably into a nightmare of his own imagining. It's debatable, though, whether styling the novel's alternate reality as noir pastiche, full of flashy pop video/CGI effects, actually serves the drama.

We all of us sacrifice our own reality temporarily when we enter into an artist's imaginative space, be that a novel or a movie. And for some reason we're often peculiarly susceptible to conspiracy theories, which offer logical patterns in the random flux. But the Fingerling episodes here are so hyper-stylised there's little danger of that. Of course, they are supposed to be fictional, but the artifice is so garish it's hard to see why it should hit Walter so hard (a relevant comparison might be Ron Howard's subtle treatment of a similar gambit in A Beautiful Mind).

It's all a game in the end (David Fincher's The Game is another point of comparison, and again The Number 23 comes up short), and it would risk spoiling the fun to say too much more. For this viewer, anyway, first-time screenwriter Fernley Phillips' scenario was twisted enough to keep me interested in how it would play out, but too far-fetched and implausible to make me believe in the characters or care about their fate.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

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