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Sunday, December 9, 2012

Always on Sunday: Life of Pi

Hidden Tiger, Crouching Theology

By Jonathan Price

Go see Life of Pi. That’s the short version. Unfortunately, though I am a fan of movies and movie reviews I am caught in a conundrum or an oxymoron or some kind of Rubik’s Cube of intellectual difficulty in that: I love seeing movies, I love knowing about them, I love the series of surprises that a great or even mediocre moviemaker throws at me, I love sitting through the 4-10 previews or, as a friend of mine so anachronistically called them, “trailers” that precede virtually every movie I see.
    And yet, I despise knowing “sound bites” about a movie that spoil its surprises or its best moments, so that you have seen them or read about them before you actually see them in their natural narrative context, where they have added bite; but in which their bites have been defanged because you have been warned. So I will try to disclose as little of plot of emotional surprise as I can in this review (and in others that may follow), but it’s a near-impossible task not to disclose some, and still offer any comment of worth. So some of you may want to take the first sentence at face value and take the risk, and go see the film, then come back and read the rest that follows.
    You probably already know Life of Pi is based on a prize-winning novel or at least that it is a story of a boy at sea in a boat with a Bengal tiger. That much is fairly true, and its visualization, in Ang Lee’s 3D version, is entrancing and spectacular. And yet there is so much more. The more will, inevitably, frustrate you, because you want to see the boy at sea with the beast, and how he manages it and what happens and what it all means. The more keeps interrupting and delaying that compelling central story. For there is a frame narrative of the Indian boy-become Canadian middle-aged man, living as a professor of philosophy in Montreal and played by Irrfan Khan, the same actor some viewers will recognize who played the near-suicidal, uncomfortably acculturated Indian patient a few seasons ago in the excellent HBO series In Treatment.


The frame story is, comparatively, visually boring, and mostly predictable in several ways, and yet clearly it provides the key commentary for the central conflict. And it explores two vast human problems, the problem of identity and the problem of divinity, presumably interwoven, for the narrator asserts his own story proves God, and the narrator is in youth a serial devotee of three major religions who wants no conflict between them, presumably a nondiscriminating pantheist. And so we may see God, somehow, in the tiger, cleverly named Richard Parker, and undoubtedly in the miraculous whale (already in many of the previews). This theme, perhaps the most challenging in the film, is felt in the magical and mystical beauty of the whale vaulting the boat in the middle of the night and in the series of plagues and manna from heaven that visit the two sojourners, but isn’t stressed much after the beginning.
    The quandary of identity is seen also in the viewpoint of the narrator and his listener, a budding novelist—for the speaker is Indian, the listener American, the setting Canadian, his own name apparently Greek—based on the irrational and endless number pi, whose digits he is seen scribbling on blackboards in his youth to prevent being teased as “pissing,” a derogatory Anglicization of his French given name “Piscine,” derived from his father, a swimmer’s, love for a pool in Paris. There are many mysteries beneath this seeming cross between Castaway Robinson Crusoe and Huckleberry Finn. Only here the antagonist is a beast without a voice but with a personality, not a volleyball, nor an escaped slave, nor a servant Friday. All of these present the dilemma of how to deal with human identity on its own, and what it all means.
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Copyright © 2012 by Jonathan Price
Editor's note: At last, a movie reviewer with bona fides. Jonathan Price is a retired English professor who has taught courses in modern literature and film, and lectured on film in Germany and Portugal.
Please comment

7 comments:

  1. luvly, and erudite, as always, dear bro...

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  2. Jon, I want to let it be known publicly (by way of this comment) that you are welcome to write a movie review for Moristotle as often as you want and are able. As your sister says, "luvly, and erudite."
        I believe that you go to movie theaters (or perhaps download recent releases) much more often than I do, so an "Always on Sunday" column mainly in your hands could expect to provide more reviews of current films. I'm sure that Moristotle's readers would appreciate that.
        I haven't seen Life of Pi yet and, frankly, before I read your review, I wasn't sure that I would plan to see it. But now I realize that I must.
        A niece who has seen it emailed me: "Life With Pi [sic] was a very unusual, interesting movie! It just had a little more action than I am comfortable with. My Son Stephen took his children and they all loved it." Have you talked with anyone who thought that Life of Pi had too much action?

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  3. So far I've only spoken with the two people I went to see Life of Pi with. Neither had any objection to the action. I could see how the 3D visuals of the tiger suddenly lunging could disturb young viewers, but apparently Stephen's children weren't upset.
    I suspect if anything viewers will find the film surprisingly unkinetic at times, since there are, for much of it, only two characters, one nonspeaking. Moreover, the long frame that introduces the film delays and often interrupts the action elements.

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    1. Oh, shit, I'd forgot or didn't pick up on the apparent fact that it's 3D. Is that right? I don't think I could tolerate a 3D movie, my eyes, double vision and all. I can hardly stand to use my eyes all day for normal things.
          I'm not saying that I wish I were blind, understand.

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    2. Morris, I completely forgot about your eye problem as you haven't alluded to it in years or complained or anything (and I'm sorry to hear there remain some difficulties). The version of the film I saw was in 3D. I believe, though I may be in error, that some multiplexes offer non-3D versions of same. Also don't know whether you've tried any 3D in years, but the technology is very different. I wore the glasses and had no trouble, and it didn't seem quite as fake. Life of Pi is the second 3D film I've seen. Not that I'm enamored of such new technologies. I think films have much to offer without those bells and whistles, but I did like Avatar. Anyway, I hope there's some method by which you can view Life of Pi without discomfort.

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    3. Well, I suppose that I should give a new-technology 3D movie a try, just to find out whether I can tolerate it, but I'm not hopeful.
          Yes, indeed, not being blind is challenging in its own way, for me. My double vision is complex (Parinaud's Syndrome). My eyeballs (or internal workings?) are sort of "twisted" (like the adjustments on a pair of binoculars—an analogy I only just thought of, but it's good if you can picture it and see what I mean by "twisted") so that the horizon slopes down to the right for one eye and down to the left for the other. Things near where the two horizons intersect aren't terribly "double," but the two images of things farther out are farther and farther apart, the farther they are from the intersection.

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  4. I saw the movie a couple of days ago and have a much different reaction to it. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that most viewers have no idea which events in the movie were supposed to be real and which were imagined by Pi. One possibility is the "Richard Parker" version: the tiger really was in the boat, and all the wonders of the voyage really happened. Another is the "alternative" version, the story Pi tells the insurance investigators, who won't accept the "Richard Parker" version. Another is the "dream" version, which I prefer. It holds that Pi was always in the boat by himself and, given his brilliant mind and pantheistic nature, he lost his grasp of reality and dreamed/hallucinated events that were compatible with his mind. Other versions that combine dream elements with elements that are real but fantastic are also plausible. I'm most satisfied with the movie if I think of Pi's mind as a stage on which extraordinary visions and miracles are played out.

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