LIFE OF PI
**** out of ****
This was one of my favorite, if not my favorite, films of 2012. While I have appreciated the craftsmanship of director Ang Lee's past works, I never really connected with any of them, with the possible exception of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005), but even that I felt didn't meet my hopes. Ang Lee's films all take rather emotional issues, i.e. estranged love in BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, budding sexuality and marital tension in THE ICE STORM, star-crossed love in CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON; but I've always felt like Lee keeps them a little distant, never really allowing the emotion to take hold like it could and should. I'll love a movie for being intelligent, but I'm primarily an emotions-based moviegoer. I can tell when a film is substituting cheap ploys and sentimentality for actual emotion, and I'm no fan of that, but I really want a movie that isn't afraid to kick an audience's emotions in the balls. I believe the best stories have heart-wrenching midsections laden with loss and despair, which contrasts sharply with a jubilantly triumphant conclusion that has been well-earned through a baptism by fire; for more on this, see Samwise Gamgee's (Sean Astin) monologue towards the end of THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS (2002), heard as the climactic battles are coming to a close. Anyway, this time, Lee delivered payment in full.
LIFE OF PI is the kind of movie that coyly strides up to your emotional personification and and politely ask, "Excuse me Mr. Emotions, but are those your genitals?" And when your emotions replies in the unassuming affirmative, the film proceeds to deliver a walloping upward kick directly to your emotional testicles, so to speak.
LIFE OF PI is a tricky movie to explain; after all, the story, adapted from a novel of the same title by Yann Martel, was often shamelessly described as "unfilmable". In essence, it is a film about religion, or more specifically, religious belief. Pi Patel, played as a teen by newcomer Suraj Sharma, is a young lad in Pondicherry, India, named after the Piscine Molitor swimming pool in France (Piscine being French for "swimming pool". His father is the owner of a zoo and an ardent atheist, but his sweet-natured mother raises him as a Hindu. He becomes very occupied with religion, learning about Jesus Christ from a kind priest in a Catholic church and of Islam when wandering into the city's Muslim Quarter. While mostly ignoring the dogma and simply wishing to love God, Pi takes part in all three beliefs, having learned of heavenly power from Hindu teachings, of God's love from Christianity and of religious brotherhood from Islam.
When Pi's father closes the zoo and books passage for the family and animals aboard a freighter set sail for North America where the animals will be sold for better prices and the Patels will start a new life in Canada, tragedy strikes. From there, I describe the story as akin to that of Job in the Old Testament, that is, a baptism by fire trial of faith.
The shipwreck is amongst one of the most stunning sequences in any film of the year, harrowing and majestic. Pi loses everything, left raw with nothing but his soul and the grace of God. The sole human survivor in a lifeboat, he soon discovers he shares this boat with a wild tiger from the zoo named Richard Parker. The main body of this epic religious fable involves Pi's experiences attempting to share a boat with the tiger in the vast midst of the ocean. It is not as bad as it sounds, in fact, it isn't bad at all; it is brilliant!
Unfortunately, it seems this film's best chance at the Oscars is in the not so prestigious category of Best Special Effects, but it sure as hell deserves it. In addition to a few other animals and a dozen or so major sequences, the tiger is CGI. Actually, some scenes of the tiger are of a live tiger on set and some are CG, but I could not identify them for you. I won't exaggerate, there are a few shots where I thought it was clearly a special effect, but I had just assumed it was all CGI, but after learning otherwise, I'm really unsure which is what. LIFE OF PI is a very sfx-heavy film, but in an unconventional way outside of action and the like, and the CG animals are very realistic, lacking any apparent sentimentalizing.
Without the 3D, it is regardless a magnificent masterpiece, but when you've seen the 3D presentation before seeing it in 2D, it's a little sad, because LIFE OF PI earns the use of the format well, often using it blatantly like a gimmick and yet with relevance. I'm not saying it needed to be made in 3D, but what they did with it made it very worth it indeed.
As a 3D film aimed at families from a director known for mainly mature films (with HULK in 2003, Lee turned a popular comic book character into a psychological experiment), LIFE OF PI invited comparisons to 2011's HUGO, directed by Martin Scorcese, but HUGO was actually a family film. I guess, going by what's actually onscreen, I can understand the MPAA's PG rating, but even then, it really pushes it. I would encourage "mature" children to see it, but it's no family film. This is extremely intense, heavy stuff, exploring themes of religious understanding, human cruelty, extreme hardship and pain, including dialogue-referenced elements of cannibalism. It's not an easy movie; it's just very worth it, and you'll leave feeling edified.
DIRECTED BY: Ang Lee
STARRING: Irrfan Khan, Suraj Sharma, Tabu, Rafe Spall
Rated PG for emotional thematic content throughout, and some scary action sequences and peril.
No comments:
Post a Comment