Josh Reviews The Life of Pi (3D)

Directed by Ang Lee, The Life of Pi is an adaptation Yann Martel’s novel (which I will state right here at the beginning I have not read) in which a young boy manages to survive a shipwreck and many months alone at sea on a tiny boat, with only a Bengal tiger for company.  Piscine (who adopted the nickname of Pi to stop his school-mates from making fun of his full name’s similarity to “pissing”) is relocating with his family from Pondicherry to Canada.  They are traveling by boat, along with all the animals from the zoo Pi’s family used to run.  (His parents were planning to sell the animals to earn enough money to start a new life.)  Unfortunately, their boat is destroyed in a terrible storm, killing most of the animals and people on board, except for Pi and the tiger named Richard Parker.  What follows is the story of Pi’s survival, which is as much a story about God and spirituality as it is about the adventures of a boy lost at sea.  Up until the last ten minutes, I was thoroughly engaged with the film, though those final few minutes nearly ruined everything for me.  More on that in a few moments.

I am continually amazed by director Ang Lee’s ability to reinvent himself from film to film.  I have loved some of his films (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Hulk), while there are others I have respected more than I have actually loved (The Ice Storm, Brokeback Mountain), but I am always intrigued when news of a new film directed by Mr. Lee is announced.  Each one of his films is quite different from the previous — in tone, in style, in genre.  Looking through his filmography it’s hard to believe his films were all directed by the same man.  What unifies his projects, I think, is his sharp eye for creating a beautiful image on-screen, bound with a tight focus on character.  In both of these senses, The Life of Pi feels very much like a quintessential Ang Lee film.

For starters, the film is extraordinarily beautiful.  As the fairy-tale-style story of Pi and Richard Parker at sea unfolds, we are treated to one astonishing vision after another, created by a masterful combination of practical effects and CGI.  I have to assume that the tiger Richard Parker was mostly (completely?) realized through computer-generated effects, but it’s impossible to tell.  The tiger looks PERFECT.  I never for one instant doubted that Richard Parker was really there, just feet away from young Pi.  It’s an absolutely extraordinary achievement, on par with the very best visual effects films of recent years (Avatar, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, The Lord of the Rings). And Richard Parker is just for starters — there are gorgeous landscapes and many other encounters with sea life, including an encounter with a torrent of flying fish (that was in the very memorable scene-length clip/trailer that was what got me wanting to see this film), each of which are realized with extraordinary skill and beauty.

When writing about the marvelous film Hugo (click here for my review) back in 2011, Devin Faraci of badassdigest.com wrote that only geniuses should be allowed to use 3-D.  I tend to agree, as seeing 3-D utilized by a master (James Cameron in Avatar — I might have disliked the film, but visually it was stunning — and Martin Scorsese in Hugo) can be absolutely extraordinary, while most films released in 3-D look just horrible.  With The Life of Pi, Ang Lee makes a strong case for his being considered in the former category, as his use of 3-D in the film is magnificent, subtle and stunning.  I felt immersed in the world of the story without ever being distracted.  Over-all the 3-D greatly contributes to the beauty of the film, and to its visual power.

I also have to heap praise on both actors who portray Pi.  Irrfan Khan plays an older version of Pi in the film’s framing sequences.  Although I am not a big fan of the device of a character telling the movie’s story to another character (I think it’s an over-used structure, and one that often deflates the film’s tension), Mr. Khan is magnificent, gentle and soulful.  I would happily listen to this man tell stories for many hours more.  Even better is Suraj Sharma, who plays Pi for the bulk of the film.  A young actor appearing in his first film, Mr. Sharma is phenomenal.  The whole movie rests on his shoulders — on his believability, and on our wanting to spend time with just him (and a CGI tiger) for two hours.  He succeeds on all fronts.  There’s not a hint of actorly fakery in his performance.  Mr. Sharma is completely genuine, bringing a tremendous depth of feeling to the film.  It is a powerhouse performance.

Unfortunately, despite all that is great about The Life of Pi, the film makes two enormous mis-steps very late in the game that almost ruined everything for me.

The first failure concerns the film’s framing device, in which an older version of Pi is telling the story to an author.  As I wrote above, I don’t love that device, but in the film’s early going I actually found myself rather enjoying the playful structure of the telling of the story.  There are some fun sequences in there (I adore the scene in which young Pi manages to successfully convince his school-mates to call him my his new, self-created nick-name), and the film quickly and efficiently sketches in everything we need to know about Pi and his unusual background.  Once the shipwreck happens, the film very wisely stops cutting back to old Pi, and just lets us be carried along by the story of young Pi and Richard Parker, lost at sea, for the rest of the film, not returning us to old Pi and his author friend until after Pi has been rescued.  Oh, except that the film DOES cut back to Pi and the white-guy author, only five minutes before Pi is rescued, for an excruciating bit of exposition about what happened to Pi on a weird, possibly-carnivorous island.

First of all, cutting back to Pi and the author totally yanked me right out of the story, and totally ruins the emotional moment just five minutes later when Pi finishes the story and we see the author’s reaction to everything he has heard.  THAT should have been the moment we returned to Pi and the author — if it had been, that would have been a very powerful moment.  But because we already cut back to them five minutes previously, that moment is totally undermined.

Second of all, that incident on the island is clearly supposed to be one of if not the central moment in Pi’s story.  This is where Pi experiences a point of contact with the divine, and seems to be a huge part of what drove him to move forward to be (eventually) rescued, and that helped him to develop his current spirituality and belief system.  And yet, in the film, we have no idea what the meaning of that scene on the island is until we cut back to old Pi to explain everything to us.  If Ang Lee felt we NEEDED that explanation, I would have at least preferred from him to have done that via voice-over, without actually cutting back for us to see old Pi and the author.  But far better would it have been for Mr. Lee and his team to have found some way to VISUALLY show us the meaning of those events on the island, rather than resorting to a boring chunk of exposition.

Which brings us to the film’s second big mis-step.  I can’t avoid some SPOILERS here, friends, so anyone who wants to go into this film fresh should probably stop reading here.

OK, after Pi is rescued he is interviewed by some men from the company that owned the ship that crashed, killing Pi’s family.  Pi tells them his story (all the events we just saw in the film), and the men, of course, don’t know what to make of Pi’s outlandish tale.  So then Pi tells them a second story, one much more believable to them.  Pi offers the men a choice, that they can choose to believe the more “real-world,” but horrible story, or the harder-to-believe, but more fantastic and life-affirming tale.  Old Pi offers the author guy the same choice.  When the author replies that he chooses to believe Pi’s tale, Pi replies: “and so it goes with God.”

OK, whoa, so first of all, that’s not at all how I see religion, as willful self-denial of the realities of the world.  I don’t know what I missed, but that hardly seems like a great spirituality-affirming moral!  I was left completely scratching my head that this was the culmination of the story that, at the very start of the film, we have been told will make one believe in God.

But, I’ll tell you what, Yann Martel and Ang Lee are entitled to whatever beliefs they choose, and while I don’t at all agree with the film’s moral (at least as how I understood it), my real complain with this sequence isn’t actually the film’s moral at all.  No, the moment I really object to is after Pi finishes telling the two company men his second, more “real-world” story.  One of the two company men then explains the whole thing to his partner and to us, telling us exactly how each character in Pi’s second story match up with characters/creatures from his first.  It is such a blinding bit of over-explanation, such a staggering example of Ang Lee and his collaborators having absolutely ZERO faith in their audience, that I was stunned.  For goodness sake, let some things go unsaid!  Let the audience digest your film, and figure some things out for themselves!!  By spelling out every single point in the metaphor, the magic of the story was completely lost.  I literally could not believe what I was seeing up on screen.  It was a shockingly amateurish move.

So, ultimately, I am not sure quite what to make of The Life of Pi. I was quite enraptured with the film for most of it’s run-time, by the beauty of the story unfolding before my eyes, and by the courage of a big-budget film to tackle issues of religion and faith head-on.  The ending spoiled a lot of the magic for me, but I do still think there is a lot in this film that is admirable and enjoyable, and it is certainly a film that will prompt a lot of discussion.  If they had better stuck the landing, this would have been a great film.