‘Life of Pi’, or, What’s Next for Cinema

I learned quite a bit about CG from The Hulk, and I wouldn’t have been able to do Life of Pi without that. But it’s easier to create an animal, because there exists a good reference — so a tiger or a hyena is easier than a 2,000-pound rage monster.

— Ang Lee

“I came to faith through Hinduism and I found God’s love through Jesus Christ, but God wasn’t finished with me yet.” Even before he begins talking, Pi (Irrfan Khan) has rather a daunting task before him. His visitor — a novelist stuck for a story — listens eagerly, having been informed that Pi will tell him one that will make him believe in God.

And so, Life of PI sets you alongside the novelist Martel (Rafe Spall), waiting to be transformed. It’s an awkward framing device, not only because it makes literal the idea of the novelist (and also fictionalizes the actual novelist, Yann Martel, who wrote the 2001 book on which the movie is based), but also because it overstates its possible purpose. Yes, it’s a metaphor. It is also distractingly oversized.

The same might be said for the film more broadly. As Pi proceeds to relay his tale, Martel is positioned on the edge of his seat, sometimes interjecting, sometimes revealed in reaction shots, his eyes wide or narrowed, his hands clasped or his arms opened wide. Pi makes lunch and loos back on his childhood in Pondicherry, India, 1977, which unfolds for you in extended, widescreen, 3D flashback. His father (Adil Hussain) maintained a zoo, populated by zebras, hyenas, and exotic birds, as well as a Bengal tiger who, by a ledger error, is named Richard Parker. The boy Pi (Ayush Tandon) is initially enamored of the tiger, much as he is of an assortment of religions; his father does his best to discourage Pi’s generosity of spirit, insisting he choose from among Christianity, Islam, and the father’s own Hinduism, and also arranging for an audibly graphic (but mostly off-screen) demonstration of the tiger’s brutality, in this case visited on a bleating goat.

The boy may ponder such violence — and feel traumatized by his father’s decision to make him see it — but the film deflects the question by turning to his adolescence. Now played by Suraj Sharma, he turns his attention to a beautiful classmate (Shravanthi Sainath), just as his father decides he must move the family from unstable India to economically promising Canada, zoo animals in tow. Here begins Pi’s life-changing adventure, when their ship sinks in a prodigious storm, leaving only him and Richard Parker alive, both on the same lifeboat for 227 days. Here too the film abandons real life space and enters wholly into CGI, inhabited more or less convincingly by first-time actor Sharma. For the rest of the film — save for occasional cuts back to Martel with mouth agape — Pi and Richard Parker interact asea.

These interactions come after Pi suffers tremendous losses, his beloved family drowned along with the ship’s Japanese crew and the non-tiger zoo animals, and so the young man is understandably shaken. As Richard Parker reflects his confusion, his upset, and yes, his rage, the creature is at once the film’s major metaphor embodied and its most compelling visual device.

Richard Parker spends much of the film’s 227 days hidden beneath a tarp or afloat in the distance, as Pi fashions a makeshift raft in order to allow both of them to survive, roped together and adrift on a tumultuous, vast, treacherous, and beautiful blue surface. But even when he’s unseen, he’s present. The relationship he has with Pi is fascinating and also repetitive, unhelpfully narrated by Pi, who speaks to the tiger repeatedly, alternately pleading and scolding, evading, feeding, and training. They’re beset by flying fish, enchanted by dolphins, overturned by a whale, and missed by a ship, endlessly receding over the horizon.

All the while, Pi uses Richard Parker as a sounding board and mirror. But even as he remakes the beast into something like his very own Wilson, Richard Parker is, of course, more volatile than the soccer ball. Implacable, ferocious, and eventually starving near to death, the tiger provides Pi a means to grow up and also to look at himself, sort of. When at last the tiger is so depleted that he cannot move, the human can pet him and even dribble rainwater into his mouth, wonder at his weakness and strength, imagine his affinity.

At the same time that Pi conjures a fantasy of the tiger, as his friend and partner, as a being who shares his internal states and appreciates his thinking without need of language, the film offers another sort of fantasy. This is less a story of coming to God than going to the future of movies. For Richard Parker is nothing if not what’s next (and also, perhaps, always already here), a CGIed entity with seeming weight, at least as much as the human, who is also mapped, by a somewhat different process, onto a two dimensional screen engineered to pretend three. Snarling and roaring, attacking and, er, crouching, Richard Parker is what’s coming, the absence of need for actors or sets or human language, the action adventure cinema that sells everywhere, without need of pesky subtitles or awkward overdubbing, the image that expands, invades and pervades, the image that knows no borders.

Richard Parker is, in another sense, the life of Pi, the movie reduced to primal and sensational imagery, a ride of sorts. But his great trick is that he is the utterly strange made familiar. Richard Parker and PI make their way across the ocean to land, such that Pi might come back to tell his story, a story about loss and dread and nature and fear. The movie around Richard Parker is simultaneously ambitious and flimsy, overwrought and sometimes banal. But Richard Parker is something else, a technological trick and an enduring figment, an idea that can’t exist and must exist.