Life of Pi

More of a ramble than a review.

I’m pretty sure this joke has been made before, but don’t they say ‘never work with children, water or animals’? That seems to be the cliché that filmmakers always use for some reason, even though the best films have always ignored it. Think of Jaws, E.T. or The Birds – they break the rules, and they’re some of the best films ever made. Life of Pi, however, breaks all three and is incredible because of it. This is very brave filmmaking. Ever since Yann Martel’s Life of Pi won the Booker prize in 2002, people have being saying that the book is unfilmable, and, looking at it with a rational mind, I guess they’re right; the majority of it is set on a lifeboat (although that didn’t stop Hitchcock when he made Lifeboat in 1944) and one of the central characters is a Bengali tiger named Richard Parker. There’s also this whole thing about whether it’s all in Pi’s mind or not, but that can be ignored for now. To be honest, Ang Lee is someone I have never really wanted to know more about. I knew he made Crouching Tiger, which I have only vague recollections as a child, and Brokeback Mountain, which I don’t remember enjoying much, but Life of Pi is such an accomplished film that all of my reservations about him have been swept away.

 The film is told to us by an older Pi, who has been visited by Rafe Spall, an author with writer’s block looking for something to write about, and Pi explains that not only will his story cure his writer’s block, but also it will make him believe in God. Now that’s interesting isn’t it? That’s a good opening to a story.  It also introduces the very strong themes of religion and story-telling that I think are brilliant themes, especially for a film such as this. Now, this framing device of having Pi himself tell us what happened is, I think, ingenious and it’s one of the main reasons why this film works on the level it does. As the story progresses, sections of the older Pi’s narration are slotted in between scenes, with the author asking a question or two, and this paces the film in such a way that it never becomes dull. It’s strange though, and very impressive, to realise that the longest stretch of the film without any of this narration is when Pi and Richard Parker are stranded on the boat, as if Ang Lee is saying ‘I don’t need anything to help me make this story interesting – I can do it perfectly well on my own thanks’.

 For anyone who hasn’t read or seen Life of Pi (and you should probably not be reading this if you haven’t done either), the story begins with a little boy named Piscine Molitor Patel (named after a French swimming pool) whose family owns a zoo in Pondicherry with large sloths, multi-coloured toucans, sprinting lizards, massive snakes and of course, a tiger named Richard Parker. The opening shots of the zoo are beautiful and make me wish I had seen it in 3D. Having suffered constant bullying (no pissing in the playground, Piscine!), Piscine decides to changes his name to Pi, and there’s this wonderful scene of him writing out the hundreds of decimal places of pi as the whole class cheers him on. He is raised as a Hindu, but as a fourteen year old he is introduced to Christianity and also discovers Islam and so begins to follow all three religions, much to the annoyance of his father. He loves animals and music and he meets a pretty girl who he takes a fancy to, but one day his father reveals that they are moving to Canada, and taking all of their animals with them in a boat across the Atlantic. Sad. Once they’re on the ship, along with Gerard Depardieu the cook and a few happy Buddhists, the boat inexplicably sinks.

 The underwater filming at this point is beautiful. Never have I seen a shipwreck so impressive as this (yes, even Titanic pales in comparison), with a zebra kicking its frantic legs and birds and lizards hopping from railing to railing attempting to escape the storm. There’s a moment when Pi jumps off the lifeboat because Richard Parker starts to clamber in, and he plunges into the sea beneath the waves and everything goes quiet. He sees the boat, now completely submerged, its lights flickering and you realise that his whole family is dead. So sad, but still, so beautiful.

 When eventually the storm clears, it’s like watching a sitcom with mismatched roommates. There’s a zebra with a broken leg, an orang-utan who’s lost her child, a blood-hungry hyena, Richard Parker hiding under the tarpaulin and Pi, who is clinging desperately to the prow. Who’s going to eat who? It’s a very tense situation, and one that Ang Lee pulls off very well, especially because each animal has its own human characteristic – you feel so sorry for the zebra, and yet you hate that hyena so much, and Pi – well, he can’t really do much, particularly when two of his shipmates are carnivorous. Once this is all settled, and it’s just Pi and the tiger, the story isn’t any less powerful, in fact, it becomes more so. Their relationship grows and grows, and it’s a credit to newcomer Suraj Sharma that the audience is captivated throughout. When shooting the film, most of the time he was acting on his own – there was no tiger, which is pretty astounding when you think about it.

 Then there’s the whale and the jellyfish and meerkat island – there’s too much to talk about, and it all contributes to this wild and magical picture of the ocean, how it can be deadly at times, but also very humbling and peaceful; there are scenes where the camera is held directly over the boat and through the clear water you can see large whales and schools of bright fish swimming underneath.

 And the ending. I liked the ending – the ambiguity of the book was kept and it was left up to the audience whether Pi’s story was what actually happened, and why I liked it was because it fitted so well with those themes of religion and story-telling. ‘Which story do you like the best?’, Pi asks the author, and in a way this is what religion is – you choose the story you like the best and it has nothing whatsoever to do with proof. The story he gave to the shipping company about surviving on the lifeboat with his mother and the cook seems to me like the ‘rational’ explanation, or the ‘scientific’ way of looking at things. Perhaps a representation of atheism and theism? Anyway, no matter what the deeper meaning, the film on the surface is still an incredible piece of work, and I should think that many Oscars will come its way sooner or later, and rightly so. 

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is an incredible piece of film-making - not only is it close to the books in terms of story, but what it shows on screen is subtle, almost toned down and fits very comfortably into Tolkien’s world. What made it such a marvel though, was how ambitious it had seemed at the time of release; no one had ever succeeded in making a film at this kind of scale and in this particular genre, so expectations were high when Peter Jackson announced his intent to adapt The Hobbit into two films, and then, months later, into a Hobbit trilogy. Excitement increased as the cast list was gradually revealed and fans began to speculate as to how Jackson would pull it off (including me) – where would the first film end? How could it possibly be extended into three films? Then finally, several days ago, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was released into the world, and it was (and I shudder to say it) sort of disappointing. What follows are my very muddled opinions of the film, in the form of a rant/review.

 The main problem was that it all looked very commercialised. Jackson, presumably drunk on power from the success of the Rings trilogy, spent most of the film trying to make it into this brightly-coloured, fun-for-all-the-family blockbuster, while simultaneously attempting to shove Middle Earth into his audience’s face, just because he can. I’m sorry, but that’s what it looked like.

 Tolkien’s books are filled with back story and extra information that, along with the main plotlines, are fascinating to read because it gives Middle Earth an extra dimension; we as readers are made aware of the sheer scale of the world in which these stories take place. And that’s great. That is why his books are as popular as they are: because of the author’s extensive imagination and dedication to what he has created. But to try and fill the script of The Hobbit with as many references, trivia and back story as possible in order to fill up the running time is not going to work. The truth of the matter is that the audience couldn’t care less about the wolves of Gundabad, the lost king of Angmar, or even the spawn of Ungoliant, especially when they’re mentioned in passing, and while characters like Galadriel and Saruman may have been intrinsic to plot of The Lord of the Rings, here they just come across as gap-fillers: unnecessary elements of the film that serve only to stretch it to its three hour running time.

 The tone of The Hobbit is at a completely different level to that of The Lord of the Rings. Everyone knows this. It’s a very light-hearted, largely uncomplicated tale of treasure hunting and riddle solving written initially for Tolkien’s children. Peter Jackson definitely knows this – he goes on about it in interviews, so why does it seem so misjudged? Why does it unashamedly try so hard to be The Lord of the Rings? What we’re presented with is a mixture of grotesque comedy and exaggerated, derivative ‘dark and brooding seriousness’, making the film seem unbalanced and most of the time unsure of itself. This might not necessarily be the filmmakers’ fault and is probably due to the Rings trilogy being made first; the bar had been set, and anything proceeding it was inevitably going to appear slightly silly. 

 To demonstrate some of the more ridiculous moments in The Hobbit, I shall use Radagast the Brown as an example. Here is a character rarely mentioned in either The Hobbit of the LOTR books, a wizard who prefers the company of animals and lives peacefully at his home at Rhosgobel in Mirkwood. His only role is to warn the White Council about the dark power massing in Dol Guldor, so he’s not really got a lot to do with The Hobbit, yet here he is riding around the forest on a rabbit-drawn sledge (not very animal friendly) with a sick hedgehog named Sebastian and dried bird crap running down the side of his face. Saruman even accuses Radagast of being a mushroom addict! The film has transformed him from a wise, friendly, nature-loving wizard, into a figure of ridicule – someone to laugh at. Characters like these are present throughout most of film (the Goblin King is an obvious one, looking completely out of place, as though he’d just walked out of the Ralph Bakshi cartoon version), but the only times they really worked were with the dwarves. Their characters were well-acted and cleverly written, Thorin especially, and theirs were the back stories that actually helped the film move forward.

 

 On that note, it needs to be stressed that The Hobbit was not awful – it was far from awful, just not very impressive, especially when compared to Jackson’s previous ventures into Middle Earth. That being said, it definitely has its moments. One of the film’s saving graces is its casting: Martin Freeman is a perfect Bilbo Baggins, not just in looks, but there’s something very Ian Holm-ish about the way he delivers his lines – I just wish he had more of them. In fact some of the best scenes are the one-to-one moments: Gandalf’s arrival is brilliant, as is Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum, which is handled surprisingly well. Jackson also manages fight scenes with a good eye for detail and camera angles, which is why many of the goblin war flashbacks worked – they were actually kind of beautiful. Similarly, the way he shoots landscapes is, as usual, incredible – it might have been a better film if he had filled up the gaps in the plot with more wide-angle shots of the company walking up mountains.

 For a blockbuster or a family film, The Hobbit is enjoyable in so far as it’s quite pleasant to be back in Middle Earth after so many years, but for fans who worship the books and the original trilogy as religious artefacts, it’s too epic for a story so simple and needed less ‘things’ going on. Or am I just being pedantic here? Do I not like it as much because it’s so different from what I imagined it would be? Perhaps I should just accept it as what it is and stop going on about it. It’s hard to decide…

Antiviral

Long live the new flesh! The new flesh here being David Cronenberg’s son Brandon, who seems to have inherited his father’s body-horror fixation and has used it to direct his feature-length debut Antiviral, an unnerving yet very entertaining piece of science fiction.

 Antiviral offers a disturbing new meaning to our culture of celebrity obsession. Televisions everywhere show round-the-clock footage of their lives and newspapers are full of the tiniest stories and scandals. But that’s just the beginning. Syd Marsh (Caleb Landry Jones) works for a company that specialises in injecting members of the public with diseases that have been taken from specific celebrities; you could be walking around with Madonna’s chest cold if you wanted to. Part of Syd’s job is to ‘copyright’ these infections: to remove all possibilities of contagion so that once they’re injected they cannot be passed on. His desire to make a bit of extra money on the side however, coupled with his own addictions, leads him to be injected with a disease so incurable, it becomes a matter of life and death.

  More a criticism of celebrity culture than an accurate vision of the future, there are moments in this film that are frankly alarming, even when compared to our present day society of Big Brother, X-Factor and Heat magazine, a world in which attaining celebrity status is the only worthwhile ambition. In Antiviral, for instance, there are companies that have developed ‘cell stakes’, slabs of grey meat grown from the muscle cells of the rich and famous that people actually queue up to buy and subsequently eat for lunch, their excuse being that it makes them feel closer to those they admire. It’s moments like these that make it a hard concept to imagine, yet it’s a credit to Cronenberg’s direction, his cold, very clinical approach to every scene, that makes it somehow believable.

  What makes Antiviral worth watching though, is Caleb Landry Jones, whose on-screen presence is beyond sinister. You might recognise him from X Men: First Class, The Last Exorcism and a couple of Breaking Bad episodes, but Antiviral is very much his breakthrough role; he won’t be forgotten in a hurry. Very pale, very freckled and with a ponytail of ginger hair, he has this contemptuous expression on his face as if trying to keep from shouting at every client who comes into his office, yet each line of dialogue is considered and slow, sometimes menacing and other times devoid of any emotion at all, and he has such a mesmerising way of walking through doors that it becomes hard to take your eyes off him. Yet Jones’ talent really comes into effect as the virus starts to take control of his body, developing a contorted, demonic stagger as he attempts to go about his life as though nothing is wrong.

  Now it wouldn’t be right to compare the films of father and son. There are certainly elements that share similarities: the hospital settings of Dead Ringers, the exploration of media and addiction in Videodrome, but Antiviral needs to be viewed as a completely separate piece of cinema, one that is refreshingly unique in its approach to a topic dealt with many times before, portraying a not-so-distant future with a strange, yet very absorbing bleakness. It’s a well-directed film with an extraordinary performance at its centre that serves as a perfect showcase for the brilliance of both Brandon Cronenberg and Caleb Landry Jones; let’s hope their collaborations continue.

(Original review: http://www.impactnottingham.com/2012/12/review-antiviral/)