A must-see for everyone aged 10-101!

Rating: 9/10 (7 January 2013)

Ang Lee, the Taiwanese director of films such as Sense and Sensibility (2000) and Lust Caution (2007), has decided to give his latest maturely themed feature the visual aesthetic of a charming children's adventure tale. As such, all trailers, posters and inattentively viewed clips of the film make it seem like the perfect holiday fodder for little ones. The parents who brought their toddlers to the session of Life of Pi that I went to weren't entirely incorrect in their assumptions. It is a magical movie, it does tell a fanciful story, and the effect on its audience is altogether uplifting, but the fantastical element is laid on top of a hard, heavy realism that pokes through more than one might expect. The real world isn't blocked out of the piece like an escapist kid's film: it is contrasted against the spiritual fantasy as a way of showing, not telling, its audience why people turn to religion even when modern science seems to constantly conflict with it.
Young Pi Patel (played by Gautam Belur, and then Ayush Tandon as an 11- to-12-year-old) has been fascinated by religion since he tried to vandalise a catholic church in rural India, where he and his family own an extensive zoo, and encountered astonishing Christian forgiveness. Since then he has also become a Muslim, and confounded his strict father (Adil Hussain) and the young author (Rafe Spall) that he relates his tale too, which we see in extended flashbacks, with his apparent juvenile miscomprehension that is actually an insightful observation that Hinduism, Islamism and Christianity all really achieve the same end, and simply imagine God in different forms. The interspersed scenes between the reminiscing adult Pi (played by Irrfan Khan) and the curious writer mostly feel as artificial and unnecessary as such setups always are, with the exception of the protagonist's poignant account of the melancholy end to his relationship with Richard Parker, the fierce but magnificent tiger that everyone has seen on the posters, and his introductory proclamation to the writer that this is a story that will make him believe in God, and I suppose there needs to be someone there for him to say this to, but anyone would do.
It takes a surprisingly long time for the teenage Pi (played extraordinarily well by first-timer Suraj Sharma) to be on the lifeboat alone with Richard out on the open ocean wearing a turban, there being a considerable early portion of the film devoted to his family life, but the introduction of the prevalent theme of spirituality runs throughout and the bloodthirsty beauty of the big cat are crucial elements that come from these scenes. Even the mundane, but still mildly interesting, family exchanges, depictions of his school life – where we discover the amusing origin of his name – and a mercifully brief, obligatory romantic sub-plot, are necessary to again show us, not tell us, of his pain when he loses all of this in a shipwreck at about the halfway-point, and begins a compelling and visually stunning fight for his life against the elements, and the astonishingly realised tiger. All of the animals in the film are totally convincing, but it is especially impressive that all sides of the this incredible predator – his strength, his hunger, his nobility, his desperation, his feline grace – are all captured so beautifully, making the multi-faceted symbiotic relationship between the animal and his keeper so totally engrossing.
Their gruelling search for land is depicted warts, and quite a few of those hideous warts, which may have been even more unrestrainedly gritty in the original novel by Yann Martel, were quickly driving all of those toddlers out of the cinema before any of them could discover how Pi's tale could defrost a person's rigid atheism, and a good thing too. The trick doesn't lie in his miraculous survival – that would have probably lost the other, older half of the underage audience – but in the very grisly, hard-hitting alternative "real" version of events that Pi tells a pair of reporters that don't believe the version we've seen, which is very reminiscent of John Steinbeck's Lifeboat, for which the fantastical tale seems to be an allegory. When Pi asks, "So which story do you prefer?" the hearts of both us and the writer of course unhesitatingly answer "the one with the tiger," before our brains can interfere with shallow logical cynicism.
While not for very little ones, parents should certainly take children past their single-digit years to see this wonderful telling of a robust but wondrous story of biblical beauty.