The director is Ang Lee, the Oscar-winning Taiwanese filmmaker who gave us the ground-breaking “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” in 2000 and the heart-wrenching “Brokeback Mountain” in 2005. It is based on the worldwide bestseller by Yann Martel, published to much acclaim in 2001 and arguably something of a modern classic. With its countless metaphysical elements and physical near-impossibilities, Martel’s spiritually rich novel was, like “Watchmen” and “Cloud Atlas,” popularly deemed “unfilmable.” But when one sees the story unfolding on-screen with such fluidity and grandness under the firm grasp of Lee, one struggles to recall why a faithful and elegant transition from page to screen was considered so unassailable and unthinkable.
Our guide is a middle-aged Pi (Irrfan Khan, “Slumdog Millionaire”), who recounts his treacherous odyssey to a Canadian writer (Rafe Spall, “Prometheus") in search of a story. First, we witness Pi’s early years growing up in India, where his middle-class family owned the Pondicherry Zoo. Teased at school for his Christian name, Piscine, he adopts the nickname “Pi,” like the seemingly limitless mathematical constant (which Pi can recite to a thousand places). He is curious about all things, but it is the concept of God that piques his interest: he prides himself as a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim, simultaneously embracing all three religions, much to the annoyance of his scientifically minded father.
When the zoo business dries up and it seems life in India is no longer feasible, Pi’s family decide to sell their animals and set sail for Canada. Their cargo ship, in which the animals are caged, is struck by a monstrous storm and is claimed by the sea in a sequence that is the most spectacularly staged of its kind since “Titanic.” Towering, roaring tidal waves devour the Japanese vessel as monkeys cling to the railing and as giraffes kick and bleat in the waters below. A truly haunting image comes when Pi, immersed underwater, watches hopelessly as the giant freighter containing his family slowly but surely sinks to the depths of the Pacific.
Pi boards a lifeboat with four fellow survivors: a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and of course Richard Parker, the whimsically monickered Bengal tiger. Soon enough, for reasons I’m sure you can imagine, it’s just Pi and Richard Parker left in the boat. When Pi was young, his father taught him a crucial lesson: a wild animal is indeed a wild animal, unthinking, vicious and concerned only with its own survival. No longer naive, Pi knows that if he is to make it home alive he must tame the ferocious, 450-pound beast that looks upon him with increasingly hungry eyes (it is made absolutely clear that this is no tiger from a Disney cartoon).
What follows is a riveting oceanic tale of survival against the odds, of adaptation, of endurance and of good old fashioned adventure. For Pi, the journey is both literal and spiritual, as his body, faith and spirit are brought to breaking point and put to the ultimate test. Screenwriter David Magee (“Finding Neverland”) sticks close to Martel’s original text, sacrificing none of its philosophical complexities, while Lee for the most part stays true to its more harrowing aspects, adding into the mix dashes of honestly earned sentimentality.
The immense weight of the film leans heavily on the shoulders of 17-year-old Suraj Sharma, who, in his debut film role, fearlessly portrays the teenage Pi. So committed to the role was Sharma that he starved himself in the name of our malnourished hero’s drastic weight loss, his ribs all too visible through the skin of his chest. Often, he is reacting to thin air: I was stunned to discover that the majestic Richard Parker was, in most scenes, a digital creation. Their interaction, which occurs in spite of Pi’s protestations, is seamless, and on the boat Richard Parker is a frightening presence with a mighty roar that sends a tremor through the entirety of the Pacific Ocean.
What Lee adds to Martel’s ideas and musings is a visual banquet so luscious and luxurious it is worthy of the king of the jungle. Working with Chilean cinematographer Claudio Miranda (who shot “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) and an art department whose work is sincerely breathtaking, Lee paints pictures of such staggering, awesome beauty one feels they must be framed and hung on the walls of a gallery. Take, for example, a scene in which the ocean’s placid surface is gorgeously lit up in the dark of night by the bright neon glow of bioluminescent jellyfish, an image almost immediately topped as a blue whale rises from below and leaps over the lifeboat like an illuminated Free Willy.
A sudden visit by a gigantic school of flying fish that catapult out from the water, and out from the screen it appears, takes full advantage of the film’s 3-D; Lee utilises the medium with the same skill and ingenuity used by James Cameron (“Avatar") and Martin Scorsese (“Hugo"), and with it creates one of the most immersive experiences I have ever had in a movie theatre. Lee doesn’t use the technology as a cheap gimmick like so many have done. Rather, he uses it to advance the story and immerse us in its watery world.
And then there’s the mysterious, algae-smothered island populated by a million meerkats, who stand, watch and run as if they were one. Like much of Pi’s journey, this island sails the fine line between reality and fantasy. Called into question at this point, and at several other points, is whether Pi’s journey is real or whether it is a hallucination. Does it really matter? Is it really important? What matters is the experience that is “Life of Pi” and the joy and exhilaration that it so effortlessly brings. As the middle-aged Pi remarks towards the film’s conclusion, “Why does it need to mean anything?”
I had the great pleasure of watching “Life of Pi” with a large audience of men and women, boys and girls, movie-goers of all ages, sizes and races. Together, we gasped as Richard Parker leapt out at the screen; we laughed at Pi’s failed attempts at taming the feral beast; we wept as hope seemed drained from Pi’s system; and we smiled as that hope came thundering back. “Life of Pi” is a film bold in its ambition and pure in its heart. It is a wonderful, faithful adaptation of a rightly beloved book, and it may well be the year’s best film.
10/10
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