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.

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