Life of Pi Review

Novels are often said to be unfilmable – Wuthering Heights, for example, constantly falls at the cinematic hurdle – and Life of Pi, the 2002 Man Booker Prize winner by Yann Martel, was also said to be one of those books. It has now been brought to the screen by Academy Award-winner Ang Lee, who has proven that, although the novel was very much a filmable one, perhaps he shouldn’t have wasted his time.

The film concerns the coming-of-age of Pi (Suraj Sharma), an Indian believer in all things religious – simultaneously a Hindu, Christian and Muslim, he is derided by his zoo-owner father and encouraged by his mother – who, following a shipwreck on his way from India to Canada, finds himself stranded on a lifeboat with only the tiger from his father’s zoo, Richard Parker, for company.

The film's faults are many and far outweigh its virtues - most obviously, when two thirds of a film involve only one actor and a CGI tiger interacting with each other, and when most of the dialogue in that section comes by way of voiceover narration, you need to have employed an exceptional actor and, although Sharma aesthetically fits the role of Pi, this is far too demanding a role for him in his first film, and he is consistently guilty of misjudging the tone of scenes, lurching from soap-opera melodrama to deer-caught-in-the-headlights woodenness and back again throughout. When you’re being out-acted by the tiger, you’re in the wrong business.

Looking at the film from a purely narrative-driven point-of-view, the film is utterly devoid of any sense of tension because of the framing device Lee employs showing a grown-up Pi telling his fantastical story to a writer (Rafe Spall) who is completely taken in and more than happy to bring the tale to a mass-market audience – if we know that Pi survives, what’s the point in the story? The only purpose it can have, in that case, is to make us ask serious questions about our own beliefs and the role of religion in general, but unfortunately the film isn’t nearly as spiritually inspiring and insightful as it thinks it is – an exchange between Pi and the writer towards the end acts as a ham-fisted attempt to justify what we’ve just seen and make it seem as though it all had a point, and then casts doubt on the authenticity of the entire film as it’s just been presented to us. How can we be “convinced of the existence of God”, as Pi claims the writer will be upon hearing his story, when the ideas coming out of Life of Pi are so muddled? Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life was far more convincing in this respect, though that was an original screenplay, and it’s possible that Lee and screenwriter David Magee were hampered by the source material.

What cannot be faulted, however, are the visual effects employed throughout the film, which wonderfully complement the cinematography of Claudio Miranda. The tiger is predominantly computer-generated and for the vast majority of the lifeboat sequence it’s utterly convincing, as are the ways in which other oceanic animals are brought to life in dazzling colour, and Rhythm & Hues Studios, which has already won two Academy Awards for its previous work, must surely be on for another come the Oscars in February. From start to finish, it’s a beautiful, dazzling film, and that’s the best thing that can be said about it.

Life of Pi is a film that you’ll discuss after seeing it, but only to try and work out what the hell its point was, wonder why so much time and effort was put into adapting it and question why you spent more than necessary to see it in 3D when that seemingly-indestructible cinematic fad managed to render the stunning shipwreck sequence (undoubtedly the film’s highlight) as dark as the inside of Richard Parker’s stomach.

2/5