Life Of Pi
Cast: Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Rafe Spall, Gerard Depardieu, Tobey Maguire
Director: Ang Lee
Running Time: 125 mins
Only so often does the correct director encounter the perfect project at just the right moment, and everything, however initially discordant, simply falls into place. With "Life of Pi” Ang Lee has mastered all the technology required to complete the transition from page to screen. The story offers the Lee the chance to show how wonderful going to the cinema can be, as he beautifully conveys a work of sheer wonder.Yann Martel’s Booker-winning novel is itself a clever mix of many elements: It’s a terrific lost-at-sea yarn; it’s a Rudyard Kipling-type fable about a boy and a tiger; it’s a desperate insurance report; it’s a meditation on reason versus religion, psychology versus myth; and it’s a story about the nature of storytelling, an exercise in magic competing with realism over the question of belief. That’s quite a lot for one book and, you would think, far too much for one film. However, Ang Lee doesn’t just capture the novel; he enhances it.
The narrative unfolds in the memory of a wise man who endured the entire experience. In his Montreal kitchen, the middle-aged Pi (Irrfan Khan) recounts his strange tale to a writer-friend (Rafe Spall). He begins with his childhood in French India, an impressionable boy living at the zoo managed by his unimpressionable father. He moves on to their planned emigration, family and animals alike, on board a Japanese freighter bound for Canada. But the ship sinks in a violent storm. Pi, then a teenager, finds sanctuary on a lifeboat, where he’s joined by a zebra, a baboon and Richard Parker – who happens to be a ferocious Bengal tiger. He concludes with the denouement, where investigators from the freighter’s insurance company query him in a Mexican hospital.
Ang Lee’s film CV shows he has the requisite skills to tackle this. In Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, and Brokeback Mountain, he proved himself acutely sensitive to family dynamics and their underlying psychodrama. But in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, he flashed his visual flair and kinetic gifts. Quickly and efficiently, then, Lee is able to sketch the dynamics of the childhood section, especially the quiet yet palpable tension between father and son. Entranced by all religious mythologies, little Pi embraces an ultra-holy trinity of beliefs – Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. In contrast, his Dad is a scientist and a rationalist. “Why not start with reason?” he argues, and then, feeding a terrified goat to the ravenous Bengal tiger, reasonably demonstrating to his delicate son that “A tiger is not your friend.” The lesson is learned and the themes are introduced – rather dramatically, so is Richard Parker.
Of course, the sea tale is the extended central section of the film and, thanks to Lee’s adroit handling of cinema’s newest tools – for once, technology is a slave to plot and not vice versa – these sequences explode off the screen. His use of 3D is absolutely dazzling, the best and most organic in any film I’ve yet seen. During the storm, mountainous waves reach out to engulf everything while underwater, roiling currents writhe and seethe. The morning after, in the dawn’s light, the calm ocean is a vast mirror with white clouds dancing on its still surface. In the days and weeks that follow, one scene follows another in a beguiling array, as the phosphorescent sea glows under moonbeams, as whales leap and sharks circle and an entire air force of silver fish flies past.
And don’t forget Richard Parker the tiger. Here is a brilliant use of it to finally justify the case for CGI, that the wizardry of a wired computer makes for a really credible flesh-and-blood beast, convincingly ferocious and undeniably scary, but vulnerable and poignant too. Yet none of this would work without the human counterpoint to these technical marvels, and this is where Suraj Sharma shines as Pi the survivor. There is a wide-eyed purity to his performance, as he, like those in the cinema is simultaneously trapped in and awed by the unfolding spectacle.
The conclusion, as brisk as the prelude, brings that spectacle back to earth again. There, in the narrow eyes of the insurance investigators, what seems like a fable can’t be a report, a lifeboat can’t be an ark, and Richard Parker certainly can’t be a tiger. So mythic drama gives way to psychological drama, and the two stories compete for our belief. Embedded in the ending is a choice. Pi’s life will definitely restore your faith in the divine magic of the cinema. Don’t miss this astonishing film.
