Life of Pi

Film Review by Jamie Dunn | 20 Dec 2012
Film title: Life of Pi
Director: Ang Lee
Starring: Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Tabu, Rafe Spall
Release date: 20 Dec
Certificate: PG

The meat of Ang Lee's visually sumptuous adaptation of Yann Martel's book club favourite is an Edward Lear-like story about a skinny vegetarian boy faring the high seas onboard a lifeboat with a tiger named, rather cutely, Richard Parker. This tall tale is being told to Rafe Spall’s credulous Canadian novelist by Pi (Irrfan Khan), the lone human survivor of a cargo ship that sank in the Pacific ocean several decades ago. The vestal was transporting Pi and his family, as well as his zookeeper father’s menagerie of animals, from India to Canada when a tempest dragged it to the bottom of the ocean, leaving the teenage Pi (Suraj Sharma) to drift with his feline companion.

Lee, a dab hand at spectacle, as anyone who has seen his gravity-defying martial arts flick Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon will testify, paints a beautiful digitized 3D canvas for this boy's own adventure. By day the resourceful Pi comes up with inventive ways to avoid becoming Richard Parker’s lunch – luckily a handy survival guide for dealing with carnivorous travel companions is included in the lifeboat’s provisions. By night he ponders God and humanity as the moonlit ocean transforms into a hallucinatory riot of fluorescent plankton, jelly fish and giant squid, which feel like acid flashbacks to the psychedelic trips in Lee’s 2009 film, the underrated Taking Woodstock.

If only the script was a sharp as the visuals. After 227 days of soul searching Pi's life lessons amount to little more than the type of platitudes found on a Hallmark greeting card. Worse still, any ambiguity about whether Pi’s yarn is fact or fable is trampled by some semiotics for morons in the last five minutes. So here’s some advice: the second Pi finishes explaining the alternative, more grizzly version of his voyage start making your way towards the exit. And I mean run. Imagine Richard Parker is pursuing you from the back row, if it helps. Because if you hang around for Spall and Khan’s pat summations you’ll be as sick as a Bengal tiger sailing choppy waters. [Jamie Dunn]