Life of Pi

Life of Pi (Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Richard Parker) – Visually stunning, amazingly ambitious, startlingly graphic.  Ang Lee, whose directing resume includes Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain (he won the Oscar), The Ice Storm, Sense and Sensibility, and Taking Woodstock, takes risks and tackles new ground.  Pi is one of the finest movies of 2012, a computer-generated (CG) survival drama.  If not for the CG technology, Pi might have been viewed as a kid’s animal film – We Bought a Zoo meets Cast Away.  But it is more than that by a long shot.

I have always liked flashback movies.  We start in present-day Canada with a writer talking to an Indian man, who has agreed to tell his amazing, perhaps unbelievable story from his youth.  From here, we are propelled back in time to a young family, the Patels, in India.  Father runs a zoo as a business venture while his wife and sons live a dutiful life.  The younger son was bullied because of his odd first name, Piscene, which is easily turned into a term for urinating.  He decides that Pi is a better name.  Pi is a searcher, intrigued by all religions.  He becomes deeply devout albeit it to a God without a specific religious preference.

When the patriarch, Santosh, decides to move the family – animals and all – the Patels head off in a Japanese ship bound for Canada.  But when a violent storm hits, the ship sinks, and Pi is seemingly the only survivor, but he is not alone.  Aboard a large lifeboat, Pi is accompanied by a zebra, a monkey, and a hyena, all of which escape the ship.  Let the carnage begin.  Fortunately, Pi avoids the action.  He is brave but scared.  And just when we think things might be okay, a Bengal tiger emerges from under the canopy covering the supplies.  The tiger has always intrigued pi though his father proved to him that the tiger is not his friend, despite Pi’s belief that animals have a soul he can see in their eyes.  The tiger’s name is Richard Parker for reasons we learn.  This is an interesting plot device, too, reminiscent of Robert Zemeckis’s Cast Away, where “Wilson” becomes the friend of the protagonist.

Pi’s adventure begins here.  Pi is resourceful and determined, forced to fend off Richard Parker, to find a way to survive not only the elements but also his ravenous partner.  Who knew that tigers were exceptional swimmers?  Pi endures flying fish, a whale, another storm, and the realities of being alone and becoming a hunter as well as the hunted.  In time, his and the tiger’s relationship evolves from a standoff to a standstill.  This is not survival of the fittest; it’s just survival.

Lee is a true artist.  He defies the viewer to distinguish real people from real animals from real underwater scenes to real skies from the computer-generated images.  You’ll swear that Pi and Richard Parker occupy this limited space for most of the two hours of the film.  The actors, Suraj Sharma as the teenage Pi and veteran Irrfran Khan (Slumdog Millionaire among many others) as the forty-something, are exceptional.  Sharma appears in his first movie and commands every scene.  Astonishing.

Life of Pi makes you squirm even while it makes you dream.  It shows how movies can serve as artistic expression that moves beyond the traditional bounds of photography and storytelling.  In 3D, it is even more engaging.  Unfortunately, Life of Pi is way too long.  At one point, I turned to Julie and said: “Why don’t they just let him die already?”  Of course, we know he doesn’t die since this is a flashback.  We take the story as a fantastic adventure, but Lee injects some doubt at the end.  How much doubt?  Enough that Julie and I talked about it all the way home, and then engaged our son, Jeff (who read the book but hasn’t seen the movie), in the conversation at dinner.

Isn’t that art at its best?

 

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