Pi of the tiger

You’ve got to hand it to Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee: every film of his takes on a unique visual language. From The Ice Storm to Sense and Sensibility, from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to Brokeback Mountain, Ang creates worlds both literate and gorgeous to look at (we’ll forget Hulk if he will) and Life of Pi is no exception.

In his adaptation of Yann Martel’s bestseller, the visual fireworks begin with the narrator Piscine Molitor (“Pi”) Patel telling the story of how he got his name. Since his father, born in Pondicherry, India, was such a fan of swimming pools, he named his younger son after a particularly glorious one in France; unfortunately the French word for swimming pool (piscine) sounds at lot like “pissing” to the boy’s classmates who taunt him for years until he rechristens himself “Pi” — and backs it up by memorizing the mathematical constant up to several hundred places.

This sequence is stunning enough (especially viewed in 3D, which is the preferred option for Life of Pi); but it’s when the Patel family decides to relocate their family zoo to Canada onboard a ship that Lee’s film goes into visual overdrive. At one point, a Canadian writer asks Pi (played in the bookend sections by Irrfan Khan) to tell his family story, having heard that it would “make him believe in God.” Well, it’s debatable whether Life of Pi contains any solid proof of God’s existence, but it will definitely make you believe in CGI. Once a certain Bengal tiger by the name of Richard Parker enters the frame, you will stop wondering where the digital trickery begins and ends and simply drop open your jaw.

There’s a lot of visual poetry in Life of Pi — from the sequence showing the lifeboat adrift in a mirror-like ocean reflecting the dawn sky, to the phosphorescent jellyfish and whale dance, to the fleet of flying fish, to the army of meerkats — and it one-ups National Geographic Channel by combining nature’s real-life beauty with CGI-enhanced personality. Thus, the meerkats are not only eye candy, moving in fluid waves across an island meadow; they also curl up engagingly along Pi’s prone form in a tree hammock, as though instructed by Walt Disney himself. (In truth, meerkats are pretty much confined geographically to South Africa, so one wonders how they proliferated on a remote South Pacific island, but never mind.)

In flashback, the older Pi relates a tale of learning to find God, from his early Hindu teachings to accepting Jesus Christ and even becoming a fervent Muslim. His father warns that believing in everything is the same as believing in nothing at all; but Pi’s path to enlightenment ultimately comes, not in the form of an iconic god figure, but through a large, untamed wild animal sharing his lifeboat after a sea disaster.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright: What mortal hand or eye did craft thy fearful CGI?

In fact, Richard Parker represents such a balance of terror and wonder to the sea-stranded Pi that one is reminded of William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” (“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright/  In the forests of the night/  What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”). Much of the philosophy of Life of Pi rests on this seeming contradiction: at any point, Richard Parker could very easily make a quick lunch of the young boy sharing the lifeboat, but Pi manages to gaze into the abyss of animal nature and, if not “tame” the beast, come to understand the hand of God working behind even those dark, primal eyes.

Again, you have to hand it to those CGI artists. Lee apparently employed something called “remote rendering” using Taiwan’s cloud infrastructure to ensure such attention to detail. Yes, there probably are a number of scenes that do employ an actual tiger; but it’s hard to imagine them filming a real live one in a giant wave tank for months and expecting him to hit all his marks. Sometimes the CGI is distracting, as in the scene where a large whale, coated in bioluminescence, breaches the lifeboat. Glorious as the shot may be, it’s almost a bit too much “wonder” for even God to conjure up. Unless He was just really showing off.

Suraj Sharma gives an impressive performance as the 16-year-old set adrift on the South Pacific for 227 days. Whether he’s watching in dazed horror as a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra and a tiger battle it out for supremacy aboard his tiny skiff, or learning to get along with his tiger companion, he’s engaging and likeable. He especially shines during a final sequence where he must give an account of the shipwreck that will satisfy a couple of Japanese insurance company agents. You can see how painful it is to revisit the truth, after weaving such a spellbinding tale.

And that’s what Life of Pi ultimately offers viewers, philosophically and spiritually: Pi’s tale invites us to consider that how we imagine God pretty much rests on how we view this life, and possibly the next. “Which story do you prefer?” the older Pi asks his Canadian guest. “And so it is with God.” Whether it’s decked out in visual CGI splendor, or relies on cold reason and prosaic truth, the story we prefer says a lot about who we are and who we’re willing to become.

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Life of Pi opens today in 2D and 3D in theaters nationwide.