Life of Pi
A young man who survives a disaster at sea is hurtled into an epic
journey of adventure and discovery. While cast away, he forms an
unexpected connection with another survivor: a fearsome Bengal tiger.
Director:Ang Lee
Writers:Yann Martel (novel), David Magee (screenplay)
Stars:Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Adil Hussain
Storyline
In Canada, a writer visits the Indian storyteller Pi Patel and asks him
to tell his life story. Pi tells the story of his childhood in
Pondicherry, India, and the origin of his nickname. One day, his father,
a zoo owner, explains that the municipality is no longer supporting the
zoo and he has hence decided to move to Canada, where the animals the
family owns would also be sold. They board on a Japanese cargo ship with
the animals and out of the blue, there is a storm, followed by a
shipwrecking. Pi survives in a lifeboat with a zebra, an orangutan, a
hyena and a male Bengal tiger nicknamed Richard Parker. They are adrift
in the Pacific Ocean, with aggressive hyena and Richard Parker getting
hungry. Pi needs to find a way to survive.
User Reviews
''I had to tame him,''
(Pi) realizes. ''It was not a question of him or me, but of him and me.
We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat." From Life of Pi
by Yann Martel.
You will see no more imaginative film this year
than Life of Pi, whose conceit of a young Indian boy stranded with a
Bengal Tiger in a lifeboat amid the Pacific Ocean is fantastical yet
real in its metaphoric implications. While the framing device of a story
told to a stranger uses the old flashback, the lonely lifeboat is as
new as any story told in the last century.
The film begs
interpretation from the multiplicity of religions to the place of
mankind in a hostile, Darwinian world. Ultimately the benign brotherhood
of beasts and humans is affirmed not so much by lofty philosophy but by
the necessity of man and beast working together to survive.
The
digital rendering of animals, especially the Bengal Tiger, is beautiful
to behold. The opening scene in Pi's family zoo could be right out of
Terence Malick's visionary camera, a montage of nature gorgeous in its
simplicity. The several formalistic shots of the boat at night are
worthy of the best lighting in the best aquariums in the world. Together
with the impressive use of 3D, director Ang Lee has visually taken us
from the opulence of Crouching Tiger and the minimalism of Brokeback
Mountain into a fusion world of fancy and reality. The images are
stunning.
In the end, Lee is interested in the individual's place
in the universe as he struggles to harness nature and yet live in
harmony with these elements. The conflict with the gross cook aboard the
Japanese cargo ship taking Pi's family and animals to Canada is
emblematic of the challenges facing the gifted with the groundlings.
Pi's relationship with tiger "Richard Parker" represents all mankind's
struggle to live in harmony with the forces it cannot control.
"Believing
in everything is the same as believing in nothing," says Pi's father
because Pi samples religions from Hinduism and Buddhism to Catholicism
and Judaism and wants them all. Although it is not given to us to have
them all, Pi's piety practically makes us believers in the universal
brotherhood.
The Life of Pi is everyone's life; the film is one
of the best of the year and, even remembering the greatness of The Old
Man and the Sea, Moby Dick, and Billy Budd, the best you will ever see
about a boy, a tiger, and a boat.
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