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.