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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