Cinema and metaphor

Rating: 7/10 (23 September 2017)

'Life of Pi' tells an amazing story of a boy who survives a shipwreck after being marooned on a raft with a tiger for company. With what is either remarkable computer graphics or a remarkable feat of animal training, the film version of Yann Martel's novel is certainly an entertaining watch, even if the tale seems unbelievable. The conclusion invites us to conceive of the story not as literal truth, but as metaphor, for events perhaps too bleak to remember without disguise. Although I haven't read the book, my guess is that the reader's shifting understanding of the narrative is crucial: the film struggles a bit, if only because film always struggles with imaginative metaphor, rendering everything with concrete reality. Film has the power to show us impossible things as fact; it's thus a tricky medium when the point of the story is, in part, that impossible things are indeed impossible. So I enjoyed the movie; but I wonder if the book might not have better handled the uncertain nature of its truth.