Life of Pi

2012 best picture nominee

Rating: 16/20 (Jen: 12/20)

Plot: It's the exact same plot as Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain except instead of gay cowboys on a mountain, there's an Indian boy and a tiger on a lifeboat.

I made it through about 1/3 of the book several years ago before I remembered that I didn't like reading and stopped. When I heard that a movie was being made, I wondered if it was filmable. I saw previews and snippets during the Oscars, most backed with this faux-Enya music, and fully expected to hate the movie. I ended up really digging it although my date hated it. At one point, she said, "If that tiger starts talking, I'm done." And I think she rolled her eyes more during this than with any other movie. I could feel them rolling. The eye-rolling isn't entirely unfair. This little fantasy is filled with all kinds of little details that just don't seem right. Bananas, after all, really don't float. The man-shaped island, a silly rainbow, meerkats that stand around and watch a tiger devour them. A lot of this is just silly. Add in some obviously-CGI animals, and this is a little hard to take at times. Don't get me wrong. This is some of the best CGI that I've seen, and I'm amazed at what they do with these animals. You really get to the point while watching this where you can't tell what is real and what is created by a computer, and then you start doubting that any of it is real. Is Suraj Sharma, painfully sympathetic in the role as young Pi, a real person or was he made by some flabby guy with too-large glasses sitting in front of a computer monitor? What about the bulging eyes of Irrfan Khan, the guy who is also really good as the older Pi? Are they real? They kind of look like Large Marge's eyes. Ang Lee's visual effects wizards must have had a lot of fun creating these waves, tossing in some extra stars, rustling animal fur, piling meerkat on meerkat, maneuvering colorful fish just below the surface of the water. And as plastic as it all sometimes looks, it really is stunningly beautiful at times. I didn't care for a new-agey display where Pi looks into the depths of the ocean and sees a whale made out of different animals, a variety of ocean life, and eventually the sunken ship, but that might have been because of the aforementioned faux-Enya music more than anything else. For the most part, this is just gorgeous. Besides, the inability to tell what is a visual trick and what is really real matches the storytelling ambiguity, the uncertainty of the viewer in knowing what parts of Pi's story is real. The unlikely friendship--a one-sided one apparently--has a beauty that matches the visual beauty, and I almost wanted to cry while older Pi was describing his feelings but Jen's audible eye-rolling ruined it. This is fluffily philosophical and not all that dense although that gives it enough space for the viewer to have the freedom to let the thing develop a bit in his or her own mind. And although there's definitely an adventure/survival story element during the majority of the movie, there's also a lot of playfulness and humor as well. Good stuff.