Life of Pi

Ang Lee – 2012 – USA

**SPOILERS**

The movie came very close to winning me over by its mid-point, but then lost me for good in its final act.  Based on the Yann Matel bestseller, it stars Suraj Sharma as an Indian teenager nicknamed ‘Pi’ whose zoo-owning family perishes when their ship goes down in a storm at sea, leaving him stranded on a lifeboat with an orangutan, a zebra, a hyena and a fearsome Bengal tiger.  I’m a sucker for ocean adventure stories, and I tried hard to like this one, but I was distracted by the CGI animals and other unrealistic special effects.  Since it turns out that the animals are symbolic, I suppose that justifies the fakery, but something tells me they would have used CGI no matter what, so I’m not very forgiving on this point.  Sharma’s unassuming performance of Pi as a smart but humble young man is by far the best thing about the film, and I did appreciate the feeling of wonder at both the beauty and the horror of nature.  But two things spoiled it for me, even more than the effects did.  First is Lee’s inexplicable eagerness to replicate the cutesy and obvious style of Hollywood movies.  The film looks exactly as it would if directed by Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, J.J. Abrams or even Gore Verbinski.  Second is the flashback structure.  The strongest stuff in the film is the long middle section showing Pi alone at sea, which is not interrupted, as the rest of the film is, by present-day scenes of the adult Pi narrating his story to a journalist.  Just when I was becoming conscious of how much I was enjoying things, the narrative broke again back to old Pi.  Eventually it is revealed that the animals stood in place of some very human characters in Pi’s version of events in order to help him cope with the horrific things that actually took place.  I realize this is key to the whole purpose and theme, as it was in the book, and is what makes it all so meaningful, but I don’t care.  To me it’s a cop-out and a gimmick.  All I could think about was how much more I would have liked the film if 1) it had been unequivocally about real animals on the boat with Pi, or 2) we had simply seen the human beings they represent.  I realize the whole point is how adventure fables are spun to make the terrible violence in the real world more palatable, but I think that idea might have been conveyed in other ways not as trite.