A Boy and His Tiger

Rating: 8/10 (15 March 2014)

In an era in which CGI has made it possible to put virtually anything one could possibly imagine up on the screen, it has become harder and harder for a filmmaker to make an audience's collective jaw drop. But Ang Lee achieves just that with his adaptation of Yann Martel's "Life of Pi." This movie truly has what we, in modern parlance, like to refer to as "the wow factor," simply because it is unlike anything we've seen on screen before. "Life of Pi" is a surrealistic tale of survival about an Indian boy trapped on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean with nothing but a ferocious Bengal tiger for a companion.
The first thought we are struck with while watching "Life of Pi" is that this movie would have been impossible to make prior to the CGI revolution in filmmaking. With so many movies abusing that technology for sheer commercial ends, it's gratifying to see a film actually using it for thought-provoking and artistic purposes (see also "Gravity"). At times brutally harsh while at others gloriously lyrical, the movie combines the realistic with the fantastical, the rational with the spiritual - all to illustrate the many disparate and dichotomous elements that, working in glorious chaotic tandem, make up this vast expanse we call the universe.
The first third of the film focuses on Pi's life before the shipwreck. Pi (short for Piscine, which as it shares a rather unfortunate homonym in English, causes Pi at a very early age to abbreviate it) is innately curious about not only the world around him but the world that lies beyond the physical. He is so fascinated with the spiritual, in fact, that he has adopted the tenets of each of the world's major religions and made them his own. Pi lives with his stern, skeptical father (Adil Hussain), his more open-minded, sympathetic mother (Tabu) and his somewhat less curious older brother (who is played by three different actors in various stages of the story). One of the prime exhibits in the zoo owned by Pi's father is a Bengal tiger that, through a bureaucratic fluke, has been tagged with the name Richard Parker, a prosaic moniker hardly befitting the king of the jungle. When the father decides to sell the zoo, the family, along with the animals, board a Japanese freighter to begin a new life in Canada (the plan is to sell the animals once they get there). On the way, however, tragedy strikes when the ship sinks in a tremendous storm, sending all but Pi and Richard Parker to the bottom of the sea. "Life of Pi" is the story of their survival.
Alternately awe-inspiring, heartbreaking and suspenseful, the screenplay by David Magee expands on the "circle of life" metaphor to explore how each element of nature is interlocked with every other element, with each action prompting a reaction unto infinity. Though natural born "enemies," Pi and Richard Parker achieve a kind of symbiosis, ultimately forced to rely on one another for survival (RP for his physical needs, Pi for his spiritual), and in so doing, they achieve a harmony that puts them in sync with the rest of the universe. Yet, for all its pantheistic elements, the movie doesn't over-sentimentalize nature, doesn't shy away from showing us the unthinking brutality that is also a part of that universe, underlined by the fact that living creatures can survive only by feeding on other living creatures. It certainly never downplays the very real danger Pi is in at every moment from his feline companion. This cat may be animated, but he's no cartoon character.
Never one to shy away from a challenge, Lee won a second Best Director Oscar for his work here, and someday the Academy might even see fit to bestow a Best Picture award on him as well (he was certainly robbed of that honor for "Brokeback Mountain"). As he has done many times before, Lee demonstrates a total command of the medium in "Life of Pi." There's a hallucinatory quality to much of the film, as Pi frequently experiences preternatural visions that transcend the confines of the material world and of rational thought, leading him to a oneness with God.
Suraj Shama has been handed the challenge - one might almost call it the burden - of carrying large stretches of this film entirely on his own, with only a CGI effect to interact with. It is a challenge the gifted young actor is more than equipped to handle and he fulfills it beautifully.
Though the movie throws the audience for a loop at the end, making us question the veracity of the tale the adult Pi (Irrfan Kahn) is relating to the writer (Rafe Spall) who hopes to chronicle the experience, no one can ever convince the true believer in all of us that this is anything other than a love story between a boy and a tiger. After all - thanks to the technical wizards who've made it all possible - we've seen it with our own eyes.