Movie Review: Life of Pi ***

Life of Pi, Yann Martel’s fantastical folk parable about faith and spirituality, makes the journey to the big screen more or less intact, a meditative Ang Lee film with many of the same virtues and shortcomings of the novel.

It’s an inscrutable morality tale for much of its length that explains itself, rather too overtly (like the novel).

But its pleasures are undeniable and its mysteries rewarding to contemplate. And in Lee’s hands, a seemingly-unfilmable fairy tale comes to life.

A survival-at-sea story is framed within the conversation of a frustrated novelist (Rafe Spall) who has been sent to meet a man (Irrfan Khan) who endured 227 days adrift in a lifeboat. Their meeting has been given quite the build-up. The novelist has been told this man’s tale is “a story that would make me believe in God”. But Pi’s autobiography is too magical, far-fetched and “literary” to be believed.

Take the character’s name: an Indian boy, raised in a zoo, named “Piscine” after a favourite relative’s love of swimming pools.

The precocious child endures profane teasing about his name just long enough to invent his own nickname. He is “Pi,” like that magical mathematical constant, and his way of making sure that the name sticks is one of the film’s funnier indulgences.

Pi is a committed vegetarian who reaches young adulthood only through the intervention of his no-nonsense father, a man who preaches that “religion is darkness” and warns against expecting to have a meeting of the minds with the zoo’s resident Bengal tiger — Richard Parker.

The tiger would surely eat him, no matter how kind he is to it. That is put to the test when the family sells the zoo and the ship they and the animals are on sinks in the deepest corner of the Pacific. Pi (Suraj Sharma) finds himself on the lone lifeboat, stranded with an injured zebra, a mourning orangutan, a crazed hyena — and Richard Parker.

Lee (Brokeback Mountain) manages to make this odd ark convincing, thanks to a seamless blending of real animals and digitally-tamed ones.

His last film never quite got the “moment” of Woodstock, but he is on much surer ground with this magical realism, this floating, seemingly unfilmable parable for a spiritually adrift age.

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