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Friday, February 22, 2013

Life of Pi is a beautiful but fleeting mirage

StarGazer




        Life of Pi feels, in many ways, like a movie that came out a year too late. With its fantastical imagery and a dreamlike tone that resembles the whimsicality of fairy tales, the film would seem more at home among the cinematic offerings of 2011, feel-good movies like The Artist, Hugo and Midnight in Paris that celebrated the power of storytelling and the human imagination, than the more stripped-down grittiness of 2012, which was dominated by such grounded movies as Argo, Zero Dark Thirty and even arguably Silver Linings Playbook. Just to be clear, this isn’t an inherently negative thing; the idea that cynical or more “realistic” movies are automatically better or more worthy of attention than ones that seek to be more optimistic and romantic has always made me roll my eyes. Like some of those earlier films, Life of Pi passes like a heady vision or daydream on a lazy Saturday afternoon. It’s pleasant enough, even jaw-dropping at times, but I couldn’t help but feel that, on a deeper level, it was a little bit empty, that it was lacking an extra something that would’ve made it truly satisfying.


       This isn’t to say that Life of Pi has no ambition or is utterly void of substance. In fact, along with the somewhat similar Cloud Atlas, it was arguably one of the most ambitious movies of the past year, the kind of project where it’s hard to not give the filmmakers at least some credit for making the attempt in the first place. Both were adapted from renowned, bestselling books that many deemed “un-filmable”, faced daunting technical challenges and tackled big philosophical questions regarding human nature and the meaning of life. Unlike the Wachowski brothers and Tom Tykwer, who turned David Mitchell’s sprawling stunner of a novel into a sprawling, sloppy mess of a movie, Ang Lee is up to the task. For someone who hasn’t dabbled much in visual effects-heavy movies, he proves remarkably adept at utilizing the vast amount of advanced technology required to make Life of Pi, which appears to have been shot almost entirely using green screens (I’m not very familiar with the making of the movie, so I could be mistaken about just how much they relied on that) and contains some of the most impressive CGI and 3D since Avatar. The mostly digitally-generated tiger, Richard Parker, is fantastically convincing. Though the significant use of computer-generated effects gives the film a decidedly artificial gloss, the surreal nature of the story makes this element largely work. Thanks to some sweeping and fluid cinematography and an intensely bright color palette, Lee brings a vivid, kinetic energy to the proceedings, a feat all the more impressive when you consider that a significant portion of screen time is spent with the protagonist confined to a small lifeboat and a makeshift raft. One scene in particular, featuring a phosphorescent ocean at night and a whale, is especially awe-inspiring, though there were several shots and sequences throughout that made me gasp due to their sheer grandeur.

        However, as spectacular as the movie is on a visual level, it does not pull off everything else quite as well. The biggest problem concerns length and, perhaps more accurately, pacing, a complaint that wasn’t exactly uncommon this past year (perhaps it was meant for 2012 after all). A lengthy chunk of exposition drags down the film before it really has a chance to start. While details about Pi’s background – such as the origin of his real name, the makeup of his family and the in-depth exploration of his childhood spiritual awakenings – may have fit well in Yann Martel’s novel, they become tedious when translated to cinema and don’t seem relevant enough to the rest of the story to make this first half-hour or so worthwhile. What’s more, they don’t add any real richness to Pi as a character or to his world. It’s only when we reach the shipwreck and the meat of the narrative that the movie starts to gain some life. Although somewhat redeemed by a third act twist, the use of a narrative framing device a la The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and almost every other movie that follows an individual’s life story feels awkward and could have been incorporated more organically; in addition, by showing Pi as a middle-aged adult telling his own story, this structure robs the survival tale of much of its suspense.

        Speaking of Life of Pi as a survival tale, here’s where we get to that “extra something” that I felt was missing.  Not only do we immediately find out that our hero lives to (literally) tell his tale, but for much of the movie, I found myself not especially caring how he manages to escape the dire circumstance he finds himself in. Again, the aforementioned twist puts the entirety of the preceding story into a radically different perspective, so perhaps this will seem like a moot point upon a second viewing, but the fact of the matter is that, while intellectually, we know that Pi’s situation is bleak and he has the odds stacked against him, we – or, at least, I – never genuinely felt the danger on a gut, emotional level. Survival stories seem to work best when you feel as though you’ve been thrown into the characters’ shoes, when you’re forced to share in their pain, desperation and despair (see: 127 Hours, for instance) ; otherwise, it’s hard to get deeply invested, especially when you already know the outcome. Unfortunately, part of the blame has to go to Suraj Sharma, the young actor who plays Pi Patel. He’s not a bad actor – in fact, he acquits himself rather nicely, given that it’s literally his first gig ever – but he lacks the gravitas needed for a role where his most prominent onscreen partner is a CGI Bengal tiger. A movie this fanciful required an incredibly grounded, forceful anchor, a daunting task, to be fair, and Sharma can’t quite manage to pull it off. Until the end, Life of Pi feels disappointingly routine, mostly empty of the psychological urgency necessary for it to work as a tale about the triumph of the human spirit. The ethereal effect created by the computer-generated visuals only heightens this aura of superficiality.

        There is a way in which Life of Pi does work on a narrative level, though. While some may likely feel cheated by the ending, which reveals that not everything is quite as it seemed, the twist is actually what saves the movie from being absolutely nothing more than artful eye candy. Though the film – and the book before it – is often presented as a story about spiritual awakening and finding/seeing God, like those 2011 movies mentioned at the beginning of this review, it’s really about the power of storytelling, the way myth and fiction can provide hope, comfort and redemption, sustaining humanity through even the darkest moments. None of the characters directly bring up this point, but in a way, it also concerns the danger of such illusions and how people use them, perhaps out of personal necessity, to cover up the ugly, brutal aspects of their pasts and human nature that they can’t face otherwise. This angle infuses nuance and a touch of surprising-but-welcome gravity in a movie that often seems to pass by all too lightly.


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