Life of Pi (PG). Director: Ang Lee. Starring: Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Rafe Spall. 127 minutes
Life of Pi offers two stories. Both concern a boy who survives a shipwreck and spends months adrift in a lifeboat. One is constructed from mundane albeit horrific facts; the other, from visual and mystical wonders, scenes of terror and transcendence that seek no less than to better understand God. The teller of these stories, Pi (Khan), the shipwrecked boy now a man, asks the listener to choose. One story might be true. The other concerns Truth.
It is the more mystical account that forms the bulk of Yann Martel's 2001 novel and now, Ang Lee's wondrous cinematic adaptation of it. The young Pi's (Sharma) travelling companions on the boat include a hobbled zebra, bereaved orangutan, sinister hyena, and a majestic but deadly Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. These animals are the remnants of a zoo owned by Pi's father who, with Pi's mother and elder brother, went down with the ship.
The food chain asserts itself, and soon Pi and Parker are the sole survivors. The perilous beast and imperiled boy gradually learn to share this space. In Pi's childhood his father warned him animals have no soul; that any depth Pi might see in the tiger's eyes is merely a reflection of his own humanity. This is true enough: gazing upon and living alongside Richard Parker enhances Pi's sense of wonder at God's creation, his compassion, and will to live.
Life of Pi's greatest attribute is its visual design. Lee's films are notable for their visual grandeur and sense of nature as beautiful, vast and dangerous. Here he has created, with cinematographer Claudio Miranda, imagery that far transcends the limited possibilities suggested by 'boy in a boat'. The ocean alone is richly black and full of reflected stars; radiant turquoise and awash with luminescent jellyfish; or whipped to a towering grey frenzy.
Pi is a religious pilgrim, in the lifelong sense. During the first part of the film he relates the childhood experiences that led him, to the chagrin of his rational father and sensible mother, to embrace not only Hinduism, but also Christianity and Islam, with the studiousness of a wise and curious child. Where these faith traditions offer Pi complementary ways of knowing God, his experiences on the lifeboat test and temper that faith foundation.
The storytelling theme is encapsulated by a framing narrative, in which