Yes, it's that sort of a film

Rating: 6/10 (15 January 2013)

The central character in this film is Piscine Molitor Patel, named for some reason after a swimming pool in Paris even though his family are from Pondicherry in India. As a boy, young Piscine Molitor, tired of being taunted with the nickname "Pissing Patel" by his schoolmates, changes his name to "Pi" after the mathematical symbol. Yes, it's that sort of a film.
As the film opens Pi Patel is now an adult living in Montreal, Canada. He is approached by a local writer who believes that Pi's life story would make a great subject for a book. Pi therefore relates that life story to him, so most of the film consists of one long flashback. We learn of his childhood in Pondicherry, where his father owns a zoo. Most of the story, however, takes place when Pi is 16. His father decides to emigrate with the family to Canada, and closes the zoo. He books a passage to Canada on a Japanese freighter, taking all his animals with him on the ship, as he believes that he will get a better price for them in North America than in India. Halfway across the Pacific the ship is wrecked in a storm, and Pi is the only survivor. He manages to struggle onto a lifeboat but finds he must share it with several animals- a zebra, an orangutan, a spotted hyena and a Bengal tiger.
The film is notable for its use of computer-generated digital imagery to render the animals, especially the tiger, and the technological aspects are certainly most impressive. The scenes in the lifeboat could, clearly, not have been filmed with real animals, but the "virtual" animals we see are so realistically done that we are persuaded to suspend our disbelief. The film is also, at times, visually very beautiful, as one might expect from Ang Lee, the director of that poetic ballet "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". Lee's poetic vision is seen most clearly in the scenes set at sea, particularly the one where the entire ocean seems to be covered with jellyfish shining in the moonlight. Suraj Sharma as the young Pi is clearly a promising newcomer, although I was less impressed by Irrfan Khan as the adult Pi, and there is a brief but memorable cameo from Gérard Depardieu as a vulgar, racist ship's cook.
My main problem with the film was that I could not really see the point of it. It was clearly intended as something more than just an exciting yarn about a shipwreck; indeed, it does not work particularly well as an adventure film because the non-realistic elements keep getting in the way. A film with a hero who is named after both a swimming pool and a mathematical symbol, who miraculously survives a considerable period of time in a lifeboat with a ferocious tiger and who encounters a mysterious floating island populated by carnivorous plants and meerkats- creatures native to southern Africa, not Pacific islands- is obviously not intended to be realistic. It must have some hidden meaning. But what is it?
There is a religious note running through the film. Pi's father is a free-thinking rationalist, but Pi himself is deeply religious- so much so that he follows three religions, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam, all at once. The ship on which the family travels is, although Japanese, named the Tsimtsum, a Hebrew word with a technical meaning in Jewish theology. Pi tells the writer who is interviewing him that he has a story that will "make you believe in God", but the implications of this are never really thought through. A story which is not only fictitious but also fantastic seems a curious argument for the existence of God. Even if one were to be confronted with a story like Pi's which was undoubtedly true, one could always choose to regard his seemingly miraculous survival as being due purely to good fortune rather than to divine intervention.
I have not read Yann Martel's original novel, but to judge from this adaptation it would appear to be a work of "magic realism", a literary genre which combines the realistic with the fantastic, and which often works better on the printed page than on the cinema screen. There have been many notable literary works in this genre in recent decades, but few have been successfully adapted for the cinema, and the few great "magic realist" films, such as Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of Cairo", have generally been based on original screenplays. Bille August made a very decent version of Isabel Allende's "The House of the Spirits", but he did so by concentrating on the realist elements in Allende's novel at the expense of the magic ones. "Life of Pi" is technically very impressive, and it has some excellent individual scenes, but it never really unites these into a coherent work of art. 6/10