Imagine every National Geographic documentary you’ve ever seen, but photographed by Ansel Adams, colored by Marc Chagall, and directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Guess what–it’s playing now in a theater near you, and it’s called Life of Pi. Based on the 2001 Booker Prize winning novel by Yann Martel, Life of Pi packs powerhouse visuals into a nature spectacle of extra-extra-vaganza.
From filmmaker Ang Lee (Oscar-winning director of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon), Life of Pi begins with a young novelist seeking a story-seed from an Indian man named Pi Patel (played by Irfan Khan). Though he lives in Canada, Pi grew up in Pondicherry, India, where his father supported the family by running a zoo. Pi recounts his childhood in a quaint neighborhood called French India; as a kid (played by Ayush Tandon) he was inquisitive and cute, adhering to Christianity and Islam in addition to the Hindu faith he was raised in. In his family’s zoo, Pi learns about animal training and psychology, and develops a somewhat fraught relationship with the gem of the zoo, a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. At the age of 16, Pi (the well-cast Suraj Shurma) leaves India with his family for Canada. They decide to sell the zoo, so they pack the animals onto a Japanese freighter and sail across the wide ocean. In what very obviously recalls Noah’s ark, monkeys screech from wooden boxes and wild birds flit around, stuffed unceremoniously into the ship’s hold like inanimate cargo.
If you’ve had even a peripheral glance at the book or the movie’s trailer, you’ll know what comes next. First the ship goes down, killing most life on board. The spectacle Lee creates in sinking the ship rivals that of James Cameron’s Titanic. With superb style, Lee makes you clench your jaw both in apprehension of danger and wonder of beauty. Though Pi survives the carnage, he is stranded in a lifeboat, oh right, and with Richard Parker on board as well. Remember him? He’s the vicious Bengal tiger from the zoo.
The crux of the movie follows, as Pi navigates the ocean for 227 days doing his best to stay alive. You’d think survival on a lifeboat would be impossible with a half-ton carnivorous companion, but Pi is telling us the story middle-aged, so we know he survives. What counts is his journey, during which he realizes that the tiger is helping him keep his sanity and life. Pi trains and learns to reconcile with Richard Parker, eventually becoming “friends” in whatever sense that’s possible. The process of narrating this is a triumph of storytelling. In a convincing blend of CGI, actual tigers, and animatronics, Richard Parker comes to life with a mix of emotion, beginning with raw animal instinct and ending with a respect and tolerance for Pi. The two’s connection is inversely related to their health; as time goes on Richard Parker becomes a shell of his former glory (live prey is hard to find in the open sea) and Pi’s eyes get filmy, his hair matted, his skin darker and his frame thinner, as he slowly succumbs to hunger’s ravages.
As a novel, Life of Pi attracted readers because it delved deep into philosophy and universal themes. Alone for many months, Pi has all the time in the world to reflect on life and nature. He makes pacts with God, shows an emotional vulnerability, and becomes more spiritual overall (albeit in the bland, nondescript sense that’s currently in vogue for religion). As Pi, Suraj Shurma is stolid and believable, a considerable feat for an actor with no prior film experience. His travails teach us less than they do in the book, but only because feature length films generally fail in adapting a developed novel. At least David Magee’s valiant screenplay reflects a solemnity of vision, flanking the surreal ocean voyage that holds the movie together with opening and closing sequences. In these he teases the themes out clearly: “It’s a wonderful story, but what does it all mean?” asks the novelist, prompting a full philosophical response that’s a meta-narrative for the movie’s purpose. Besides, what Life of Pi lacks in thematic perfection it more than makes up with stunning visuals and transcendent innovation on the director’s part.
A native of Taiwan, Ang Lee is a superlative filmmaker who manages to milk every drop of inspiration from every one of his scenes. You’d think a movie set mostly on open sea would become boring and artistically uninspired, but in Lee’s hands the ocean steals our breath away again and again. The sea often breaks fourth wall conceptions of the theater, functioning as a screen that we see through, a spyglass, a mirror, you name it. It’s the same ocean, but in every scene it’s a different world and mood, colored and stylized by Claudio Mirando’s highly appealing cinematography. See the movie in 3-D, because Mr. Lee is one of those rare directors who actually uses the medium for artistic exploration. We feel immersed in what we’re seeing, even in cases when it’s only a boat and a life-raft. There’s a heightened sense of movement and depth in the movie’s surrounding space.
Life of Pi rarely misses a point, and there’s not a scene or a camera angle that isn’t eye-popping. Every one of Lee’s gosh-wow set-pieces–bio-luminscent whales, flying fish, expansive constellations, a dream sequence–is involving, gorgeous and affecting. Pi’s boat washes up on a floating island that’s home to a thousand billion jillion meerkats; you want to just eat the island, that’s how beautiful it is. There’s no way the novel, originally considered unfilmable, can communicate visual imagination that’s even close to this movie. Life of Pi is a movie suffused with a majestic creativity that certainly qualifies it as one of the year’s best films.