Life of Pi (movie review)

     Life of Pi (2012) [D: Ang Lee. Suraj Sharma, et al] We went to see this because Marie has read the book and liked it. She said the movie followed the book quite well; she even commented on what some sequences were supposed to be, e.g., a "mythic world".
     I haven’t read the book, and based on this movie, I won’t be reading it. When the book first appeared, some reviewers alluded to Latin American "magic realism", and drew comparisons with Gabriel Maria Marquez. I don’t know why, but this kind of comparison puts me off. I’ve read some Marquez, and seen the movie of Love in the Time of Cholera, which I enjoyed a lot. Maybe I fear that comparisons will set me up for disappointment.

      The movie was entertaining enough, with some tense moments when Pi is almost drowned for example, and the imagery was sometimes gorgeous. The most interesting bits were the back story about the family preceding the shipwreck. There are unanswered questions about how the tensions and conflicts within the family might be resolved. Pi’s sampling of several religions is nicely done, and for my money a story interweaving the family and personal threads would have been enough. The shipwreck and the bit with the tiger is gratuitous fantasy, and about the only thing that can be said in its favour is Pi’s own comment: "It happened. Why should it have a meaning?"
     Pi’s search for meaning is the theme and excuse for the story, and presumably his ordeal of survival on a lifeboat with only a tiger for company is supposed to help us understand the existential ambiguities. Pi at first tells the tiger story to the insurance investigators, and when they reject it, tells them a more horrific tale of murder and revenge, which to my mind has the ring of truth.
    The frame story has Pi telling both tales to a visitor (who’s visiting Pi on a recommendation by Pi’s uncle), but only the tiger story is actually shown. The visitor interprets the fantasy as a version of the reality, and decodes it as such. Then Pi asks the visitor which tale he prefers: "The one about the tiger." We may prefer that story, too. Some of us, anyhow. I don’t. I find it a rather pedestrian fantasy, actually. The struggle to stay alive, with all the apparently trivial random events that threaten death, was involving enough. The tiger isn’t needed to increase the tension, so why is he there? Because Yann Martel decided to put him there, I suppose. Or because he wanted the tiger to be a symbol for the Other that resides within all of us. A bit pretentious, and so awkwardly done that the visitor’s explication is actually needed.
     I wouldn’t have chosen to see this movie, but having seen it, I can say that if you want to spend a pleasant, if not exactly involving, couple of hours in a movie theatre, you could do a lot worse than pick this one. Camera angles and imagery clearly show that it was scripted for 3D. The acting is very good. Lee and his editor know how to cut a scene to extract maximum tension. The music (which apparently caused the composer some difficulties) is not overly intrusive. It’s been nominated for 11 Oscars, IMDb rates it at 8.2/10, it’s at 88% at Rotten Tomatoes, but I rate it only ** out of four. I did like Richard Parker, the tiger, though.