Life of Pi (2012)

A few months ago, I walked into a theater, 3-D glasses in hand, sat down in a dark room and witnessed a movie. It was one of the biggest critical successes of the year, winning four Academy Awards and seemingly endless acclaim. In hindsight, I think half the reason I was interested in seeing it to begin with was all the fuss made about the cinematography, and I saw it in 3-D, against all my usual principles, to make sure I didn’t miss some sort of extraordinary visual masterpiece. The movie was, of course, Life of Pi and to say that I walked out conflicted would put it mildly. I so much didn’t want to have to confront it in the form of a review that I ended up writing about nothing for the rest of the year. With the help of a thankfully 2-D blu-ray disc, I have now revisited it and feel rather guilty for ever viewing it so impatiently.

I confess, this is not a movie that is easy to digest. Clocking in right at two hours, a good half of that time is spent following a young man who has been shipwrecked and stranded on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean. If you go into the movie expecting some epic spectacle, what you will actually find may be a little hard to take in. The first half of the film skims over the events of our young antagonist’s life leading up to his family’s ill-fated voyage from India. The movie deals largely with Pi’s search for God and his desire to convince us of the necessity of faith through the telling of two stories: one beautiful and comforting, the other horrifying and hopeless. The movie’s visuals really are breathtaking, made all the better when not seen in dim, blurry 3-D, and the effects are equally stunning. The computer-animated tiger that gets a lot of screen time is so convincing because the movie doesn’t waste time trying to wow us with its realistic look. It is so subtly accurate, that we don’t notice. Even if the movie leaves you dry in terms of theme and emotion, it is still well worth seeing for its images.

Ang Lee is truly a great director, with a varied body of work that includes Sense and Sensibility, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hulk and Brokeback Mountain. Now, he has brought to the screen an incredible cinematic experience adapted from a book that has long been considered unfilmable. How well the results work on an emotional level will vary from person to person. I still can’t seem to connect with Life of Pi as much as I want to, though I regret ever calling it an all-out failure just because of this. I have spent a great deal of time mulling over the movie, weighing my personal pros and cons, trying to determine whether or not I thought it was “good.” Well, would a bad movie have stayed in my mind for so long? This is a well-written, thought-provoking, beautifully shot and not easily ignored movie that has worked for many people. There are times when it tests my patience, but, at the end of the day, my nitpicking does an injustice to this wondrous work. I can safely recommend it.

8/10