A gorgeous allegory for imagining
and surviving the impossible
and surviving the impossible
The Astounding Visuals from Life of Pi |
script, but I don’t know how much it’s departed from the novel. Lee has worked from literary adaptations with different screenwriters before with Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Brokeback Mountain. I haven’t read the Chinese novel, but in the other three cases, I much preferred the movies. Lee brings a grace and humanity to these works that deepens them emotionally.
Life of Pi is majestic once it moves into its flashback story, which is most of the movie. It’s not giving away too much (after all, it was the book’s jacket image) that the teenaged Pi ends up in a life raft with an adult Bengal tiger after their ship capsizes. The major conflict is how Pi will survive without being eaten. What seems simple becomes an allegory on a number of levels including the power of imagination to escape insanity and the creation of religious philosophy to deal with the impossible. Most significantly, Pi says, “Hunger can change everything you thought you knew about yourself.”
Suraj Sharma as Pi |
One bonus for me and to emphasize the visual beauty is that we saw the movie in 2-D, though I could guess the sequences where it would have been compelling in 3-D. I really dislike 3-D because my eyes physiologically cannot keep up with it so I generally nod off. Thankfully, and unlike the extremely long Avatar, Life of Pi is being shown in both formats.
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