Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Life of PI

The most imaginative film this year.


Life of Pi
Grade: A
Director: Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain)
Screenplay: David Magee (Finding Neverland) from the Yann Martel novel.
Cast: Suraj Sharma
Rating: PG
Runtime: 127 min
by John DeSando


''I had to tame him,'' [Pi] realizes. ''It was not a question of him or me, but of him and me. We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat.” From Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

You will see no more imaginative film this year than Life of Pi, whose conceit of a young Indian boy stranded with a Bengal Tiger in a lifeboat amid the Pacific Ocean is fantastical yet real in its metaphoric implications. While the framing device of a story told to a stranger uses the old flashback, the lonely lifeboat is as new as any story told in the last century. 

The film begs interpretation from the multiplicity of religions to the place of mankind in a hostile, Darwinian world. Ultimately the benign brotherhood of beasts and humans is affirmed not so much by lofty philosophy but by the necessity of man and beast working together to survive.

The digital rendering of animals, especially the Bengal Tiger, is beautiful to behold.  The opening scene in Pi’s family zoo could be right out of Terence Malick’s visionary camera, a montage of nature gorgeous in its simplicity. The several formalistic shots of the boat at night are worthy of the best lighting in the best aquariums in the world. Together with the impressive use of 3D, director Ang Lee has visually taken us from the opulence of Crouching Tiger and the minimalism of Brokeback Mountain into a fusion world of fancy and reality. The images are stunning.

In the end, Lee is interested in the individual’s place in the universe as he struggles to harness nature and yet live in harmony with these elements. The conflict with the gross cook aboard the Japanese cargo ship taking Pi’s family and animals to Canada is emblematic of the challenges facing the gifted with the groundlings. Pi’s relationship with tiger “Richard Parker” represents all mankind’s struggle to live in harmony with the forces it cannot control.

"Believing in everything is the same as believing in nothing," says Pi’s father because Pi samples religions from Hinduism and Buddhism to Catholicism and Judaism and wants them all.  Although it is not given to us to have them all, Pi’s piety practically makes us believers in the universal brotherhood.

Life of Pi is everyone’s life; the film is one of the best of the year and, even remembering the greatness of The Old Man and the Sea, Moby Dick, and Billy Budd,  the best you will ever see about a boy, a tiger, and a boat.

John DeSando co-hosts WCBE 90.5’s It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics, which can be heard streaming and on-demand at WCBE.org.
He also appears on Fox 28’s Man Panel
Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com

.

John DeSando holds a BA from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in English from The University of Arizona. He served several universities as a professor, dean, and academic vice president. He has been producing and broadcasting as a film critic on It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics for more than two decades. DeSando received the Los Angeles Press Club's first-place honors for national entertainment journalism.