Ang Lee (2012)
I was sorry when I heard that Ang Lee was to direct Life of Pi since I like Lee and loathed the book – although I was keen to know what attracted him to Yann Martel’s novel. According to Wikipedia, Lee’s making Life of Pi is not a case of enduring determination to bring to the screen something which became a personal passion: he was the fourth director attached to the project, following M Night Shyamalan, Alfonso Cuarón and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. In Lee’s hands, the material commands a respect it doesn’t deserve and the movie isn’t annoying, which is no mean feat. But Pi Patel’s biography remains deeply uninteresting.
The screenplay by David Magee virtually replicates the narrative structure of the novel except that the framing device – a Canadian author with writer’s block visits the middle-aged Pi who, he’s been told, can tell him a story that ‘will make you believe in God’ – doesn’t have a first-person voiceover. The Yann Martel alter ego is played by Rafe Spall, who does creditably in a thankless role; Irrfan Khan is the older Pi. The first part of the movie, which describes Pi’s childhood and adolescence in Pondicherry, India, where his father runs a zoo, is time-consuming (as in the original) and moves slowly. Perhaps audiences will feel the movie really gets going only when the Patels and their zoo leave India, on a Japanese cargo ship bound for Canada. (Those on board include Gérard Depardieu as a nasty cook.) The ship sinks in a storm, all on board perish except for Pi and four zoo animals, and the young man’s survival-against-all-the-odds journey – on a lifeboat, across the Pacific Ocean – begins. The suspense throughout this part, the bulk of the story, is limited to the extent that we already know that Pi does survive. We don’t expect the four animals – a zebra, an ourang-outang, a hyena and a Bengal tiger – all to do the same; certainly not the hyena (because it’s nasty), probably not the zebra (lacks personality). The pair with the best chances are Pi’s fellow primate and the tiger which we already know has a human name, Richard Parker, that is hardly likely to be wasted.
The events on the lifeboat make for a tedious read. Most of the reviews of the film I’ve seen and heard suggest that Ang Lee has done a brilliant job of bringing life on and around the craft to the screen, and making it exciting. In visual terms, this praise is fair enough. The animals are, most of the time, CGI creatures rather than the real thing. They’re highly convincing, and the red-in-tooth-and-claw fights between them on the lifeboat are startlingly strong. The following sequences, during which Pi and Richard Parker (by now the sole non-human survivor) develop an uneasy modus vivendi, are engaging too. As far as I’m concerned, so is everything else involving Richard Parker. The only parts of the film I found emotionally affecting were when the tiger was ailing and his final exit – a rear view of his worryingly skinny backend – into an island jungle. These bits mattered to me not because of the 3D imagery (as usual, the 3D glasses darkened the picture – I can’t believe this is what the director intended) or because the scenes were especially imaginative but because Richard Parker is a big cat. Perhaps it is the 3D that takes Life of Pi to a different level for people who enjoy the film; it certainly isn’t the human drama. Suraj Sharma is a fine (pictorial) camera subject and he plays Pi conscientiously but there’s nothing he can do to make this survival story unlike any other that’s made it to the screen before. Reviewers are lauding the magical beauty of the images that Ang Lee and his cinematographer Claudio Miranda have created but just the same kind of language is used about David Attenborough etc natural world programmes on television. (The shots of the inhabitants of the Patels’ zoo in Pondicherry during the opening credits are amusing and seem to capture the essence of each animal shown; but these too do no more than evoke high-class wildlife TV documentary.) The pleasant music in the film is by Mychael Danna.
Pi Patel has a strong religious disposition. As a boy (played by Ayush Tandon), Pi becomes interested in Christianity and Islam, as well as the Hindu faith of his native culture – a faith which seems not to be a governing force in the lives of Pi’s rationalist father (Adil Hussain, who’s excellent) and botanist mother (Tabu). Whatever impact Pi’s story may or may not have on the beliefs of the blocked writer, it isn’t clear how the shipwreck affects Pi’s own. (During his time at sea, I think Vishnu is the only deity whom Pi invokes specifically.) He went to sea a believer and returns to dry land as one, without much evidence of spiritual struggle or questioning in the meantime. Religious references and details seem to be enough for many people to find a religious ‘dimension’ in Life of Pi (including people who don’t like the story as a consequence).
It’s received wisdom too that Pi is ‘about’ storytelling – that we’re not sure how much of Pi’s account of what happened on the lifeboat is true. (If his story is invented to a greater degree than anything in a work of fiction is invented, this makes Yann Martel’s novel even more infuriating.) The supposed proof of the importance of this theme is that Pi, once his odyssey is over, offers a different story – one more believable to the Japanese owners of the ship that sank and who interrogate him. Pi tells them he was shipwrecked with four human beings rather than four animals. Which of the accounts is the true one (is either of them true?)? These aren’t competing narratives throughout the story, however; the human quartet option is merely tacked on. This is all that Martel does (and Magee and Lee, faithful to the book, do) to substantiate the storytelling theme. Martel also takes the opportunity to fuse this weedy post-modernism with the shallow spirituality of the book. Pi asks which version of the two stories the writer prefers when the latter chooses the Richard Parker version, Pi replies, ‘And so it is with God’. I don’t understand what this means and am not inclined to believe it’s because it’s too deep for me.
The naming of the principals in the story has the same quality of being instantly effective but meaningless once you think about it. Pi’s uncle had a passion for swimming and swam in different pools in different countries. His nephew is named for the uncle’s all-time favourite pool – the Piscine Molitor in Paris. The forename is abbreviated when its owner gets fed up with his schoolmates calling him Pissing Patel – but would Indian boys naturally use English profanities? We’re told that the tiger was captured by a hunter, who gave the animal the name ‘Thirsty’; that the hunter was called Richard Parker; that the paperwork got mixed up so the two identities were switched. It seems no one found it surprising that the human being in the transaction had just the one name of Thirsty. Yann Martel is as cavalier in his use of these details as he’s superficial in his coverage of the book’s big ideas. After Sally and I had read Life of Pi, one of our friends borrowed the book. When she returned it, she explained that it was looking the worse for wear because she dropped it in the bath while she was reading. I would usually have been infuriated by that but in this case it didn’t seem to matter. The idea of this particular book getting into deep water is obviously apt anyway.
23 December 2012
