Movie review - Life of Pi directed by Ang Lee

I happened to watch Life of Pi on the first day it was released, which was just a chance happening. We went to see Skyfall and noticed that Life of Pi was playing in the same multiplex and decided to watch that instead. I am really glad we did that for on a scale of 1 to 4, I would certainly rate Life of Pi  above 3.14159……. 

As the previews of upcoming Hollywood movies gave way to the feature film, the lilting song Kanne Kanmaniye made my heart skip a beat. Hearing our mother tongue on an American screen still has a special allure for me. The song was composed and rendered very soulfully by Bombay Jayashree. From that point on, until the end of the movie, I was sitting on the edge of my seat, fully absorbed in the movie. The 3-D version made me feel like I was there as part of the story. I highly recommend the 3-D version, if you have a choice.

I read the book soon after it bagged the Man Booker award and hence I do not remember the details. But, I can say with reasonable confidence that the movie was true to the story. Usually, I do not like movies made out of good books because the movie marginalizes the level to which one communes with characters and situations. (Gone with the wind was one exception for I loved the movie almost as much as I loved the book.)  

Life of Pi is a classic example of how a movie can exploit dimensions that are orthogonal to the experience of reading a book. While reading the book, I imagined I was Pi (or at least with Pi), stranded on the sea, with only Richard Parker, the hungry tiger as companion. The three days I took to finish the book, the book occupied my mind and I agonized over what might happen in the next chapter. I  I followed the journey of Pi's spiritual evolution through these 227 days on the sea. The movie on the other hand, unraveled other dimensions - brilliant direction, amazing visuals, and excellent acting. The director made incredible situations look remarkably life-like. With CG technology, they made a tiger not only look realistic, but I even felt that we could read his emotions and thoughts! The way they made him move, quaver, bounce and pounce was simply mind-boggling. The director Ang Lee took care to show the tiger grow skinnier under that loose skin as days passed by, just as Pi's hair kept growing longer and his skin more sun-tanned with the sun and salty sea spray.

As for acting, I felt Suraj Sharma fit the bill very well and his debut performance was quite praise-worthy. Though Irrfan delivered his piece with his usual aplomb, I felt he did not have much of an opportunity in this movie to show his brilliance and hence I failed to understand why the critics said it was an Oscar-worthy performance. Likewise, Tabu had very little chance to show her thespianism.

Now, coming to the sociological aspects of the book – I was a bit flummoxed by a Patel family talking in Tamil in their home. Granted, they were living in Tamilnadu. But, their talking in Tamil was not natural and needed some kind of explanation, which I do not recall from the book. Indian culture is complex and multi-layered that not even Indians can pretend to understand it fully. But, the association of surnames with the state that people belong to – many Indians are adept at, and a little more research by Yann Martel would have corrected this fallacy. Also, I was confused about whether Yann believed that all Indians are vegetarians (like many in the US believe) or was he trying to show that this was a Brahmin family (reading Krishna's story at bedtime etc.). If so, Brahmins in the 70s were very unlikely to be zookeepers, another incongruency that would have done well with some explanation.

But, all in all, I would say that Life of Pi is a must watch movie. Here is a trailer to pique your interest.

Book Review - Life of Pi by Yann Martel

The protagonist of the novel is a sixteen year old boy, Piscine Molitor Patel alias Pi, the son of a zookeeper in Pondicherry. The young boy is interested in zoology as well as religion. He learns about three religions; Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam and adopts all three of them as he sees them all as paths to God. The story is set in the 1970s during Indira Gandhi’s “emergency rule” in India. Pi’s family, speculating that the zoo might be taken over by the government, decides to migrate to Canada and live off the money they would get by selling their animals. Their ship capsizes on the way to Canada. Pi manages to get into a lifeboat and escape from the sinking ship. He is the only human survivor, accompanied by some of their zoo animals; a Bengal tiger (Richard Parker), a zebra, a hyena, and an orangutan. In matter of days, the only ones left are Pi and the tiger.

On the face of it, this is a story of Pi’s survival for 227 days on the sea, with a tiger in the lifeboat. (227? Would 314 have been cooler?) To keep distance from the hungry tiger, Pi creates a raft for himself, using oars, a lifebuoy, and life jackets, and tethers the  raft to the lifeboat. Staying in the raft most of the time, Pi tries to assert himself as the alpha male against the tiger, by using an emergency whistle and the tiger’s sea sickness to his advantage. But, he is painfully aware that the threat from the hungry tiger is still quite real. The story tells us how Pi survives by cleverly using all his resources to procure food and water, saving himself from sharks and a school of flying fishes, suffering through ferocious storms, landing in the island of meerkats, coping with the havoc that the sun and the salt water wreak on his body etc.. The reader can empathize with Pi, as the author describes Pi’s gamut of emotions from terror to loneliness to sadness to despair and ultimately hope and faith.

At the end of the novel, when a 40 year-old Pi tells the above story of his survival to Japanese investigators and finds them incredulous, he tells them an alternate version, replacing the zebra, hyena, orangutan and the tiger with a Taiwanese sailor, a wicked cook, his mother, and Pi’s own alter ego respectively. The story with the humans is ghastly. Pi asks the investigators which version they prefer, the one with the animals or the one without? The question is profound because it underlines the deeper allegory of this story.

One might say that Pi used animal parallels as a defence mechanism to survive the harsh conditions at sea, while preserving his faith, sanity, sense of morality. It was easier for him to acknowledge the horrific acts by humans (including himself), if he internalized them as actions of animals. One could interpret that his creation of this ferocious tiger (in place of his alter ego) was to enable him to survive. The alter ego enabled him to commit terrible and heinous acts of survival, which would have been impossible for his own moral persona to perform. They would be natural for a tiger. The raft in which Pi spent most of his time can also be seen as a metaphor for his faith and belief in God, for it keeps him alive, saving him from the tiger, his horrendous alter ego.

The book certainly makes you think beyond what the words literally say. It leaves much to one’s own interpretation.