According to Yann Martel, author of the Booker
Prize-winning novel Life of Pi, “If your fear
becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid,
perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself
to further attacks of fear because you never
truly fought the opponent who defeated you.” In
the film version of Life of Pi, the fearful
opponent is a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker
(explained in the film) and its worthy adversary
is a teenage boy (Suraj Sharma) trapped in a
lifeboat in the middle of an unforgiving ocean.
For Pi, fear is the ingredient that is both his
enemy and the friend that keeps him alive and
helps him to maintain his faith.
Directed by Ang Lee and adapted for the screen
by David Magee, the film is an adventure story
in the mold of Robinson Crusoe, a testament of
faith, and a philosophical Rubik's Cube that
will keep you awake pondering its meaning.
Whatever meaning you ultimately bring to it, the
film is a sumptuous visual experience that
combines a dazzling combination of state-of-
the-art 3-D and CGI technology to breathtaking
effect. The adventure is framed by the adult Pi
Patel (Irrfan Khan) relating his incredible
story to a Canadian journalist (Rafe Spall),
sent by a friend to listen to a story that
“would make him believe in God.”
As a young boy Piscine Molitor Patel (Ayush
Tandon), the son of a zookeeper in Pondicherry,
India, shortens his name to Pi to avoid being
teased at school. Pi is a spiritual seeker who
attracted to Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity
and has even studied the Jewish Kabala. Pi's
embracing of all non-conflicting religions
mirrors is rejected by his parents whose
philosophy is secular, and his father Santosh
(Adil Hussain) challenges his son to make hard
choices in life. "Believing in everything,” he
says, “is the same as believing in nothing,"
Santosh is a hard taskmaster who graphically
demonstrates, after Pi attempt to feed the
Bengal tiger in their zoo, that wild animals are
not your friend and will kill you without a
moment's hesitation.
Unfortunately, hard times fall on the family and
Santosh must sell the zoo and take the family
and some of the animals to Winnipeg, Canada
aboard a Japanese cargo ship. When an unforeseen
storm batters the vessel, all members of Pi's
family and the ship's crew are lost at sea. Pi
is the only survivor and clings to a lifeboat
accompanied by a hyena, an orangutan, and the
huge cat, Richard Parker who climb aboard. The
young Pi witnesses the survival of the fittest
and soon finds himself alone in the middle of
the ocean with a ferocious tiger. The terror of
the shipwreck is made real in a visceral 3-D
experience of the raging water, thundering in
surround sound.
The central portion of the film depicts the
day-to-day effort of the boy to tame the tiger
and provide enough food for both to survive
their over 200-day ordeal. The magic of
technology produces beauty as well as terror in
scenes of the ocean at night with the boat
wandering alone beneath the stars, a cadre of
flying fish, luminescent jellyfish, and a
leaping whale. Whether or not you believe that
the boy is really in danger aboard a boat with a
man-eating tiger does not detract from the
sublime feeling of connection with nature that
the scenes engender. To add a surreal aspect to
the adventure, the two companions find
themselves on a strange floating island overrun
by a colony of African mongoose known as
meerkats that allows Pi to gather more food for
his return to the sea.
While the film's coda puts a slight damper on
what we have just seen, the questions it raises
are central to the film's message. Contrary to
the opening invitation to the writer to research
Pi's story because it would “make him believe in
God,” Martel says that, “God is not IN the
story, but that God IS the story,” and
challenges the viewer to choose which story to
believe, the one we have experienced for almost
two hours or the alternative story that Pi tells
Japanese insurance investigators. According to
the author, “Stories are important, because
everything is in how we perceive it and nothing
is really real until we say it is, so why not
choose the better story?”
In my view, what Martel is saying is not that we
should choose the better story because it
provides a palliative by keeping pesky reality
away, but because it offers the context for a
richer experience of life. Did the Hanukkah
candles really burn for eight days without oil?
Did the Buddha really live? Did Christ? We can
never know for certain, but ultimately it may
not matter if the impact of the stories can lead
to a true spiritual experience, one that is
touched by love whether or not you believe it or
have a Bengal tiger along for the ride.
