You could see this movie 3.14 times and still not catch all the nuances and meanings Director Ang Lee has finessed into his unlikely bit of cinema. Lee and his team believe in magic and they share it generously with their audiences.
The film comes reasonably close to the book by Yann Martel—and that makes it all the more amazing. The book has been called unfilmable by some (Oh, goody—a movie about 200 plus days in a lifeboat) but, fortunately, Lee wasn’t listening.
He takes the tale of a young Indian boy whose family owns a zoo and turns it into a multi-level tour de force in which allegory, raw adventure, fantasy, and a harsh coming-of-age story all intertwine. Young Pi (short for Piscine Molitor Patel) and his family head for America with the animals. The ship hits a serious storm and Pi is adrift in a lifeboat with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a very hungry bengal tiger named Richard Parker. It sounds like one of those “A blank, a blank, and a blank walk into a bar” jokes. Director Lee avoids easy solutions. He mixes danger and charm to keep our interest and our excitement.
Richard Parker is no smiling Tony-the-Tiger cartoon. He may be our relative in the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, but he is a predator. He would prefer to keep his place in that web by eating us. Pi thinks he sees deeper feelings behind the big cat’s behavior. In that instance, he is a stand-in for all of us. We anthropomorphize the animals around us—perhaps to feel less alone in the universe. Pi wants the tiger to be his friend. No spoiler here, but in the end, the tiger just wants to be a tiger. An interesting lesson there perhaps. Director Lee never forces the issue. He sets up situations that can make us examine our own takes on life’s questions.
Ang Lee is a story teller. In fact the telling of Pi’s story becomes one of the themes of the film. Lee knows how to emphasize parts of the narrative and how to gloss over others—without leaving anything out. As in some of his other films (Brokeback Mountain is one that comes to mind) Lee includes the sadness, but doesn’t leave his audiences wallowing in it. He weaves the sadness in, along with all the other colors. The result is an opulent tapestry of a movie that is worth seeing more than once.
The rich cinematography by Claudio Miranda, augmented by Mychael Danna’s music, and a mass of magical special effects, animatronics, computer graphics and such, combine to take viewers on a journey. For some it will be a journey of pulse-raising adventure. For some the voyage will be a spiritual one in which significant life questions float by gently. For many, the journey will be both.
