You Can't Herd Cats

Rating: 7/10 (25 August 2019)

Have you ever actually physically seen a tiger? I had the tremendous fortune to see one once, at a zoo, concealed behind what I presume was a fairly thick wall of glass. They are sprightly animals: expressive faces, strangely full of both confidence and apprehension; eyes which cut right through you when they stare you down. Their agility is quite striking, gracious, but of course deadly, in their hopping and pouncing to and from their chosen platforms. Between the open-air monkey enclosure; the penguin performance and the tarantula on one of the zoo keeper's arms, the tiger was certainly one of the highlights.
Broadly speaking, the premise to "Life of Pi" is that someone, a teenager, is stuck on a small life raft with one of these beasts in the middle of the ocean. The tiger cannot eat the boy, otherwise it will starve, but of course it doesn't know this, and the boy, who is of course stranded, must fish for food to sustain both his own life but also to keep the tiger at bay. Ang Lee, directing, spins a nimble tale out this idea, borrowing, in terms of imagery and general approach, from some of the more successful films of this stock from recent years: "Forrest Gump" and "Amélie", for instance, while the sense of being stranded in one place and having to rely on resourcefulness calls to mind "Cast Away". You know the types I mean: slick, good looking and colourful dramas which glide along at their own pace. Fans of its genre will enjoy it, but there is a little bit more in there besides in terms of its exploring things to do with morality; evolution and where exactly God sits in the world.
The film begins in the present-day, and so broadly speaking consists of one, long flashback, with the titular Pi, a man of Indian descent, in his Canadian home speaking to a struggling author (Rafe Spall). The author is looking for something with some spark to put down into a book, and he seems to think he's found it in the titular Pi, who experienced what can only be described as a unique experience in his younger life. We flash right the way back to India during Pi's youth, wherein his family runs, in actual fact, a zoo. But amidst all the animals on display, hypnotically put to us via the opening credits sequence, it is the tiger which attracts Pi's attention the most - beautiful but deadly, elegant in its movement and monitoring of its surroundings; fur like velvet you can only stroke when it is under anaesthetic.
In a sense, much of what Pi encounters during this opening act in India has little to do with what the film will come to depict, in that he excels somewhat at mathematics at school; has difficulty communicating with girls and swims a bit, but it presents him as a human-being and a boy who, like any boy, has these experiences at school and home. At the zoo, his father forces him to watch the aforementioned tiger consume a goat when Pi becomes a little too enamoured with the creature, and this kills something inside of him he cannot quite define, although to what extent it had to do with anything later on is unclear. Perhaps his experience at sea was the catharsis he needed to rekindle his lost feelings, but it couldn't be as simple as that, could it?
Lee moves the film into the second act with a dramatic shipwreck sequence when Pi's father feels the family set-up and all involved must move across the ocean to Canada; the going down of the liner and our perspective of it eerily, and I'm sure not wholly accidentally, calling to mind the earlier imagery of Pi's father swimming in the crystal-clear waters of a Parisian pool with the bright blue sky in the background. From here, the meat of the film unfolds as Pi and a scatter-shot crew of animals from varying points on the food-chain uneasily congregate on a lifeboat and are left to float on their own. The passage allows the film to mediate on a variety of things, but only via the perspective of a young boy who has happened to read up on the world's religion, but has also lost everything he had.
Consequently, the film teases us with a Darwinian plight involving the animals which, unsurprisingly, goes the way of the fittest. There is a tantalising moment whereby an Orangutan, the closest to human-beings in an evolutionary sense, seems to realise it needs to put on a life-jacket. Pi confronts God via prayer when he is forced into terminating the life of a fish to survive, something which drags us back to the world of the Old Testament when people were forced into the barbarous action of slaughtering bovine animals in order to live before using God to justify it and writing it all down in Leviticus, a sort of apology to themselves. He then does so again via a means he at least thinks is more physical when a tropical storm strikes the boat and we are, again, reminded of how people in dire situations used to put their circumstance and the natural world around them down to a deity punishing and/or testing them.
The film is all at once a disaster movie; a comedy; a biography and a rumination on life and the world, but it is never enough of any one of these things to have it feel contained or constricted to the generic demands of either of these things. Instead, "Life of Pi" is a refreshing and often exhilarating drama with a bite as powerful as any wild cat's.