I decided to read Life of Pi because I had watched the movie a long time ago with my family and attempted to read the book afterwards. It’s like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” with a splendid tiger in it, a beast all the more splendid for being nothing but a figment of pixels.Sache Krishnaraj, Design Editor | March 20, 2019 One can take it straight as a hell of a rousing open-boat adventure. But whatever Life of Pi is trying to say about the Hindu/Buddhist Wheel of Suffering, it says much more interestingly than did Cloud Atlas. The film also deploys some Deepak Chopra–style bromides such as the old wheeze “Science can tell us about out there but not what’s in here …” accompanied by a self-satisfied thump of the thumb against the breastbone.
Surely, Life of Pi delivers vegetarian rhetoric of the highest quality. A Stoic might applaud this film’s symbols of Appetite controlled by Conscience.
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In one moment, we take a 3-D ride into the Day-Glo insides of Krishna’s mouth, and it’s full of stars. The movie certainly seeks to contain multitudes. Life of Pi seems more excitingly pagan than anything else, though the godless might be touched with a wave of Hindu pity for the sorrowful carnival of the world-the cycle of eating and being eaten, redeemed maybe by the multitudinousness of life. The film didn’t make me a believer-except maybe in the God of Stories. Maybe he’ll be the first star of Indian ancestry to be big in America. In a Bergman-like straight-to-the-camera speech, away from his tiger, we see how expertly Sharma holds our attention. Why isn’t this all unicorny? We do get a reverse angle on the story: a spiritual person’s despair at the tiger dwelling inside of men. Pi sees a vision of his drowned mother composed of schools of fishes, full fathoms five below. The seas are sometimes so millpond flat and mirror-clear that you could walk on water, or they boil with phosphorescence, making the boat appear to be floating through space in reflected stars. Worn down by weeks of certain doom, Pi puts his trust in providence. In one of the few editorialisms foisted on an otherwise glorious tiger, we see that the animators have allowed a touch of Puss-in-Boots’ pity face, familiar from the Internet: huge eyes and folded ears as it hangs, soaking wet, on the side of the boat. Richard Parker leaps after a fish and then can’t get back aboard, and Pi must decide whether or not to let his potential murderer drown. Lee finesses the predicament, from its outlandish humor to its poignant side. Being stuck in an open boat with a tiger is something like a vintage Laurel and Hardy joke, and the situation has its funny moments (such as an ultimate pissing competition).
Richard Parker has never seen a Disney movie he has a vicious temper and refuses to be gentled. When the fur stops flying, Pi and the tiger are the lone shipmates. Then, out of the waves, comes the zoo’s tiger, Richard Parker (his strange name is also a story in itself). The animal freighter sinks, and the young Pi (Suraj Sharma), the sole human survivor, is stranded in a 20-foot-lifeboat with a wounded zebra, an elderly orangutan and a ravenous hyena. When the money runs short, the family must sell the critters to overseas collectors. Dad runs a zoo the animals weave sleepily, on the verge of siesta, through the titles. The son of a man who believes only in logic, Pi becomes pious in all the religions, in passages that director Ang Lee envisions as a handsome pastiche of Satyajit Ray. The narrator’s strange name is a story in itself. Over lunch with an avid, even moist-eyed American (Rafe Spall), whose last novel was stillborn, Pi unfolds the tale of his singular voyage to the Newer World from his middle-class home in the French colony of Pondicherry-a Tintin-esque locale. Pi (Irrfan Khan) is a demurely friendly professor in modern Montreal. A little more modestly, the computer graphics represent a milestone of the technique, and although the film comes with a heavy wow-factor, it’s not lobotomized like Avatar. Not content to be absolutely phantasmagorical, Life of Pi claims it will also make you believe in God.
SHIPMATES: Young Pi finds himself sharing a lifeboat with a dangerous companion in ‘Life of Pi.’
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