The Life of Pi – review

The Life of Pi (PG)
dir: Ang Lee

Ang Lee is the eclectic’s eclectic, a Taiwanese director who has ranged freely between English period romance (Sense and Sensibility) and Chinese wartime espionage (Lust, Caution), martial arts swashbuckler (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and gay melodrama (Brokeback Mountain). In his 3D adaptation of Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Life of Pi, Lee surprises us once more: I would never have suspected he could make something quite so facile.

The lion’s share of the screen time is given over to a tiger and a teenage boy stranded on a boat in the Pacific Ocean. The lad is Piscine “Pi” Patel (Suraj Sharma), while the tiger, incongruously named Richard Parker, belongs to Pi’s father, who is transporting his zoo animals from India to north America when their boat is struck by a typhoon. Lee is nothing if not a director who knows how to wring every drop of tension from a set piece, and he peaks early in Life of Pi with a storm sequence that finds within terror a dislocated beauty. The underwater shot of a zebra paddling past Pi in the submerged ship, with the doggedness of an afternoon swimmer completing his laps, is so bewitching it hardly matters the trailer spoiled it for us months ago.

Once calm descends, Pi must simply survive. Viewers nostalgic for the innocent charms of Disney’s The Incredible Journey will find little succour. The film focuses squarely on the practicalities of how one might remain alive while confined to a lifeboat with a ravenous tiger.

Like Avatar, this is a movie that couldn’t be realised until the technology was available: you would get through a few crew members trying to extract from a real tiger the sort of performance given by a computer-generated one. But Lee overestimates the effect of his visual coups. The animals suffer in certain shots from that lack of heft that remains the Achilles heel of CGI. The seascapes and horizons have a deliberately synthetic, storybook quality but the marvels that pepper the voyage – a berserk wave of flying fish that whip the sea into a froth, or a majestic whale looming out of the ocean – feel self-consciously spectacular. Then there is the use of 3D. There’s a nice eerie effect when the camera gazes up from the ocean bed at Pi swimming so that he appears to be floating in the sky but the film’s colours are fatally dulled by the grey tints on our 3D specs; I kept peering over the top of mine to see how ripe the cinematography would look without them.

The late Michael Crichton once told me that he had been downhearted after seeing Terminator 2: Judgment Day, that watershed moment in CGI, because he knew there would no longer be any barriers to what could be conjured up on screen. The dream, I suppose, would be that other aspects of the film-making process would be fortified: screenplays might become more complex, the camerawork innovative, to keep pace with technology. If this is the future, Life of Pi is a disastrous advertisement. David Magee’s screenplay is hamstrung by the banality of the points in Martel’s novel about the intersection between storytelling and faith. The film begins with the adult Pi promising he has a tale that will make anyone believe in God. It ends with a twist – well, more of a mild kink – that provides a new definition of anti-climax. The impression you take from Life of Pi is that of an extravagantly decorated cake with nothing inside but the wisdom of a fortune cookie.