- Ang Lee's Life of Pi is an allegory -- sorry, make that an ALLEGORY! -- depicting a young man's ill-fated voyage across the Pacific Ocean. In a lifeboat. With a tiger. Incidentally, the tiger has the rather mundane name of Richard Parker while the man goes simply by Pi. Actually, his full name is "Piscine" (after a French swimming pool, naturally) but that sounded too much like "pissing" when he was young, and you know how cruel one's fellow children can be. So Pi memorized a chunk of the transcendental number π and the nickname stuck. I realize this all sounds precious and contrived, but in fact the entire situation is infinitely more contrived than you would initially suspect. But for a moment let's ignore the film's imbecilic ending and focus on the real story, which is the eponymous life of Pi.
- Pi is played at different ages by four different actors (Gautam Belur, Ayush Tandon, Suraj Sharma, and Irrfan Khan), all of whom do a terrific job with the material. Sharma and Khan get the most screentime, respectively, as the young man who gets shipwrecked and his reluctant older incarnation who tells the tale to a superfluous reporter (Rafe Spall). In short, the tale is that Pi's gentle mother (Tabu) and uber-rational father (Adil Hussain) once owned a zoo in India before deciding to pack up the animals to set sail for Canada. A sudden storm capsizes the ship, however, and Pi finds himself stranded on a lifeboat with an odd assortment of animals, including a kindly orangutan, an injured zebra, and a ruthless hyena. Just as it seems that the devilish hyena is going to kill off all of the boat's passengers, the much-feared Bengal tiger Richard Parker erupts from his hiding place to establish his role at the top of the food chain. And then there were two.
- As a child, Pi was fascinated by both religions (he adopted three of them) and Richard Parker, but he never expected to have his faith in both institutions shaken so dramatically at the same time. While the tiger technically saved the young man's life from the hyena, it's also obvious that Richard Parker wouldn't hesitate to have Pi for a meal (no pun intended). In fact, the film is admirably unromantic in portraying its tiger, making Pi's childhood claim about "the soul" behind Richard Parker's eyes seem increasingly divorced from reality. As the ship drifts, the two eventually settle into a semi-stable equilibrium in which Pi stays out of Richard Parker's way while trying to keep him fed and healthy. As delirium sets in, the two encounter strange drifting islands teeming with meerkats and kaleidoscopic seascapes that reveal the myriad creatures lurking beneath the ocean's surface. The CGI-enhanced overhead and bottom-up views of Pi's boat floating in the strangely translucent water are certainly the most novel visual aspect of the film, and I regret not seeing those scenes in 3D at the theater. In two-dimensional home video, the visuals are merely interesting, much like the skillful employment of CGI that went into creating most of the film's animals.
- But now we get to the problems with Life of Pi, and boy are they ever severe. One is that the entire proceedings were a big, fat lie. Think the ending of The Usual Suspects, but with the audience feeling like that cop who dropped his coffee cup. Another problem is that the allegory is completely opaque as it is being told (although maybe I should have recognized Gérard Depardieu) and overexplained afterward in a painfully perfunctory scene. The most severe problem, however, is that Life of Pi is overflowing with really bad philosophy. As I understand it, Pi's claim is that life makes for a better story with God than without, and that people should believe in God for this reason. If my family died in a shipwreck, which I assume is the one part of the story that actually happened, I have to think I'd want something a little more theologically sound than that argument. After all, life would be way more interesting with flying monkeys, so should I pretend they exist, too? In answer to Pi's allegedly profound question "Which story do you prefer?", I suppose I gravitate towards stories with a single ounce of intellectual integrity. That rules this one out.
- Based on a novel by Yann Martel.
- One of the Japanese insurance investigators (James Saito) played The Shredder in the 80's live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Awesome.
