As far as I know, filmmaker Ang Lee has never made the same type of movie twice. This is, according to an interview he gave a few years back, by design. Looking at his resume, I can totally believe this assertion; his body of work includes an adaptation of a Jane Austen novel (Sense and Sensibility, 1995), a Chinese martial arts epic (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000), a superhero movie (Hulk, 2003), a love story between gay cowboys (Brokeback Mountain, 2005), an erotic thriller set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai (Lust, Caution, 2007) among others.
The Life of Pi goes a long way towards reinforcing Lee's reputation for keeping his resume varied, and towards enhancing his reputation as a master filmmaker capable of just about anything on which he sets his artistic sights. Based on the novel by Yann Martel, the film is about a young Indian boy, Piscine Molitor Patel, nicknamed "Pi" and how he survives a shipwreck that kills his entire family.
The story begins with a Canadian writer (Rafe Spall) interviewing the adult Pi (Irrfan Khan) about his life experiences, having been introduced to Pi by the latter's uncle. Pi then recounts his story, from the origin of his given name and nickname, to the time he decided to practice three religions, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam, all at the same time in a quest to be closer to God, to the time he found himself lost at sea.
His family, based in Pondicherry, India, owns a zoo, but as time goes by his father opts to sell the zoo to Canadian buyers and to relocate his wife and two sons, of whom Pi is the younger, to Winnipeg. During the lengthy boat ride from India to Canada, however, the family is waylaid by a storm that ends up sinking the entire ship. Pi and a handful of animals from the zoo survive on the ship's lifeboat, including an adult Bengal tiger named, oddly enough, Richard Parker. The story that follows is a truly strange one, interspersing Pi's actual experiences and visions or hallucinations so often that at times it becomes difficult to tell the difference between what happened to him and what he only thinks happened to him, though one thing is clear; he feels that these experiences have defined his relationship with God.
In this day and age in which "religion" is treated like a four-letter word it was actually refreshing to see a film that managed to talk about religion openly, and yet which managed at the same time to avoid being preachy or overbearing, as many "faith-based" films can often be. Perhaps one reason all mention of religion is so easy to swallow is the positively buoyant quality of Lee's work here; he deftly mixes topnotch acting, cinematography, music, and wonderfully whimsical digital effects to tell his tale, and if time and budget allow me I dearly hope to watch this in 3-D, the way I think it was meant to be seen.
This film has often been compared to Robert Zemeckis' 2000 film Cast Away, in which Tom Hanks played a Fed Ex employee stranded on an island in the middle of nowhere with only a volleyball for company, and to be fair the comparison is, to an extent, valid, given that both films are largely about the power of the human spirit, but Lee's story is not merely one of survival against the odds, but of finding the divine in unimaginably hostile conditions. After all, Tom Hanks' character did not have to live at sea with a Bengal tiger constantly trying to eat him.
In this respect, furthermore, newcomer Suraj Sharma does an outstanding job as the 16-year-old Pi Patel (with Khan playing his adult version and other actors portraying the character as young children). This is an actor whose very first feature film called upon him to spend most of the film in a water tank acting opposite nothing, or at the very best, markers where the eventual digital creatures would appear, and yet he is utterly convincing. He took me on Pi's journey of loss and pain, anxiety and survival, and eventual epiphany and redemption. It's an exhilarating trip, one enhanced by some topnotch visual effects through which Lee is able to depict the encounters with the various zoo animals, especially the fierce Richard Parker, a whale and various other species of sea life, and even Pi's trippy hallucinations.
All things considered, apart from Sharma (and to a lesser extent Khan, whose narrator is actually a bit of a narrative cop-out for reasons I will explain later) the only other real star of this movie is the tiger Richard Parker, who is portrayed in the film through a combination of computer-generated imagery, animatronics and use of a live animal. Rhythm and Hues, the visual effects studio that won an Academy Award for the talking animals in 1995's Babe: The Gallant Pig, and that won over the hearts of C.S. Lewis devotees with their spectacular rendition of Aslan the Lion in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, are responsible for the digital version of Richard Parker, and I dare say this is some of their finest work.
I think it is to the ultimate credit of Lee and his visual effects crew that in probably all but the most extreme scenes it is next to impossible to tell which particular device is being used to portray the tiger at any given time; I tend to think most viewers, like myself, would assume the tiger was only CGI when he was too close to Sharma to be anything else without putting the actor in the peril of his life, or when he was called on to do stunts which may be deemed cruelty to animals. At any rate, Richard Parker is a special effect for which recognition is definitely in order, and as big a fan as I may be of Marvel's The Avengers, the sole Academy Award nomination of which is for Best Visual Effects, I seriously hope that that The Life of Pi takes home that particular prize.
For all its virtues, though, I confess that I was not all that fond of the "narrator" device, especially when I found out that this was not part of the book but introduced solely for the film. It robs the audience of some suspense by disclosing, right out of the gate, that whatever happens to Pi, he will survive his ordeal, apart from the fact that it's a rather overused technique which was prominently employed in films like Titanic and Saving Private Ryan.
Still, I suppose the filmmakers, who plunked down $120 million on what had to have been a somewhat risky venture considering the subject matter and the complete absence of any bankable movie star, had to hedge their bets one way or another.
All things considered, though, this is a minor quibble as the film was just one of the most wondrous viewing experiences I have had watching a film released in 2012, and whatever accolades and awards this movie receives, I am firmly convinced that it will thoroughly deserve them.
5/5
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