Life of Pi – review

Life of Pi – review
The digital effects are
mindblowing, but the ending of
Ang Lee's magic-realist fable is
exasperating. No one can doubt the technical
brilliance of Ang Lee's new film,
an adaptation of Yann Martel's
Booker-winning bestseller from
2001, a widely acclaimed book
that I should say I have yet to
read. The effects are stunning,
more impressive than anything in
the new hi-tech Hobbit, and on
that score, Peter Jackson can eat
his heart out. But for the film
itself, despite some lovely images
and those eyepopping effects, it is
a shallow and self-important
shaggy-dog story – or shaggy-tiger
story – and I am bemused by the
saucer-eyed critical responses it's
been getting.
Pi is Pi Patel, played as a teenager
by Suraj Sharma and as an adult
by Irrfan Khan, and it is the adult
Pi we see recounting his story to
an inquisitive author (Rafe Spall),
who yearns to hear something
that will cure his writer's block. Pi
tells him it might do more: it
might enable him to believe in
God. As a teen, Pi and his family
journeyed by steamer from India
to Canada, where his father hoped
to restart his business as a
zookeeper, and he brought his zoo
animals with him. A storm wrecks
the ship, and Pi finally finds
himself all alone on a lifeboat with
an adult Bengal tiger; in the
existential ordeal that follows, Pi
and the tiger face the battle to
survive.
The digitally created tiger is
incredible, or rather, very
credible. I expected it to be an
obvious CGI beast or uncanny-
valley creature. It's better than
that. Every second it was on
screen, I thought: that unreal
tiger really is mindblowingly real-
looking – how did they do that?
Well, I suspended my disbelief in
good faith – and my scepticism
about "magic realism" also – and
Lee's brilliant digital work made
that easy. But the adventures of Pi
and the tiger are cancelled by an
exasperating ending, the crux of
which is a question Pi asks Rafe
Spall's writer, and the answer he
receives. Both seem founded on
some fatuous assumptions. This is
an awards-season movie if
ever there was one. It deserves
every technical prize going.
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