Life of Pi in 3D, Cert PG, 127mins - review

Ang Lee’s mastery of modern cinematic technology makes his boy in a boat with a Bengal tiger look real — but the cod-spirituality is phoney
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20 January 2013

Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi, about a boy surviving for 227 days in a small lifeboat with a Bengal tiger (or not), was the surprise winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2002.

It has since gone on to delight millions around the world, becoming the bestselling Booker winner ever, translated into 38 languages. Barack Obama, no less, wrote to Martel to praise the book as “an elegant proof of God, and the power of storytelling”.

Others, however, while enjoying the book’s adventure at sea narrative, have remained sceptical about its claims to be a deep exploration of belief, a scepticism only reinforced when Martel eventually produced his dud follow-up in 2010, the tasteless farrago, Beatrice and Virgil, summarised by Martel himself as “writer meets taxidermist meets Holocaust”.

Ang Lee, the director of films as diversely excellent as Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Ice Storm, Sense and Sensibility and The Hulk, says when he first read Life of Pi in 2001, he thought “nobody in his right mind would make this into a movie: rationally, it would be too expensive”. But in 2009, commissioned by Fox, he began to think of ways in which it could be done: using 3D, for the first time in his career; framing the narrative by having the older Pi relate his story to a listening writer (sympathetically played by Rafe Spall); creating the largest water tank ever, to get better waves; filming in his native Taiwan; casting an unknown 17-year-old to play Pi (Suraj Sharma, appropriately unhistrionic); and, while using CGI for the tiger Richard Parker, modelling him closely on a real tiger for verisimilitude.

Lee is a wizard, Life of Pi is an incredible spectacle and the technical effects are brilliant. The film company claims it represents a historic advance in motion picture technology, just like Titanic, Avatar and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and the claim seems fair enough. The tiger, which is digital throughout, is remarkably convincing — it really does appear to be a living animal in alarming proximity to Pi in the lifeboat, thus making the crucial dynamic of the movie work in the way it needs to do.

Many of the scenes at sea, when the ocean luminesces at night and is filled with floating jellyfish, for example, are simply beautiful, albeit in a bit of a screensaver way. The storms are frightening and the transition between real water in the wave tank and “CG H2O” seamless. Flying fish and meerkats leap about excitingly. There’s a whale. If you already love Life of Pi, you will surely be swept away by this adaptation, which could hardly have been better done.

The problems of the book remain. Once the ship taking Pi, his family and their zoo to Canada has sunk, we are, like our hero, stuck in the ocean with limited dramatic resources for a very long time. There are only so many ways Pi and the tiger can interact in and around the little boat and they are exhaustively played out to the point where I was hoping the tiger would just gobble the boy up and be done with it or that I was watching Marley & Me instead.

The sequences showing Pi’s family life before the voyage, in Pondicherry, filmed in Pondicherry itself, are delightful but they are already marred by the sententiousness of the novel. Little Pi innocently maintains that he can follow all religions at once and has a mightily significant confrontation with the tiger which results in his father telling him, so importantly: “That tiger is not your friend!”

When the lifeboat is tossed in the storm, Pi shouts: “God, I am your vessel! Whatever comes, I want to know! Show me!”

But the “leap of faith” that Life of Pi plays out, in book and film, is phoney. The conundrum at the end — which version are we to believe about what happened, the tuppenny coloured or the penny plain — is no true dilemma.

In the plush book, The Making of the Life of Pi: A Film, A Journey, Martel says he has never given a definitive answer as to which is the true story, the one with animals or the one without. “It is for each reader to decide what Life of Pi is about. But I’ll say this: the story of Pi and Richard Parker is one of existential choice. How do you live your life? Are you directed by the flat edicts of rationality, or open to more marvellous possibilities?”

There’s a loaded question, an easy choice. But the belief that Life of Pi invites is ultimately only in its own story, its own marvellous possibilities, nothing beyond. God is not proved. It is cod-spirituality, therefore, not actually challenging anything, though it trades on that aura.

Lee’s mastery of modern cinematic technology does induce you as the viewer to believe at least in what you are seeing (an effect incidentally only undone by studying “the making of”, a reveal as disillusioning as seeing a picture of the cast of The Archers). You can believe in his artistry, for sure. But the mystic twaddle still sticks in the throat.

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