Life of Pi,
based on the same-titled 2001 novel (Booker Prize for Fiction in 2002) by Yann
Martel, screenplay by David
Magee (nominated for best adapted screenplay) is a lush and fanciful
tale of a spiritual journal of survival. It is nominated for eleven academy
awards, including Best Picture and Best Director (Ang Lee, Broke Back Mountain). Piscine Molitor Patel “Pi” (Suraj Sharma) is
a young man whose fight to survive after having lost everything, including his
parents and brother, is a kind of love story about the love of life, his own
life, as exemplified in Richard Parker, the tiger with whom he is stranded on a
life boat in the middle of the ocean.
Pi’s family departs its homeland of India --accompanied
by their formerly owned zoo’s animals—on a ship bound for North America where
they will sell the beasts and start a new life.
When their ship goes down in a storm, only a few make it to the life
boat. In addition to Pi and the Bengal tiger Richard Parker, there are the mama
orangutan, a broken legged zebra, and a ravenous hyena. Each perishes until
only Pi and Richard Parker remain. The hyena eats the zebra and orangutan; the
tiger eats the hyena. To avoid becoming its next meal, Pi must catch enough
fish and fresh water for the both of them. As the two move
toward a mutual understanding, Pi, all the while evading the jaws of the
tiger, discovers that caring for Richard Parker becomes Pi’s reason to live,
just as Martel says the writing of this novel became the
direction and purpose for his life.
Perhaps in some other year I would have voted
it the best film of the year, but not this year with so many excellent films.
Still certainly I found Life of Pi the
most beautiful, and think that cinematographer
Claudio Miranda deserves the Oscar. Any adjective of praise (magical,
beautiful, miraculous, gorgeous) all apply here. Ocean
becomes sky, sky, ocean, both firmament for glowing stars and phosphorous, fish
and clouds, as the universe is gloriously united as one whole, a whole which
includes Pi, and which he treats with reverence.
To dedicate one’s life to some purpose, or to
belong to some greater whole than oneself, confers meaning to life where all,
for each of us, is eventually lost. Disappointment, tragedy, death come to us
all. In the interim, we strive for connection and meaning making,
sometimes rewriting the facts to make bearable the tale. It turns out that Pi’s
story may have been reworked, that the hyena is the ship’s cruel and culturally
insensitive cook, who kills the zebra sailor and the orangutan, Pi’s mother, and
eats them both and uses them for bait. That leaves Pi as the tiger, looking to
find reason to save himself amidst his enormous survival guilt.
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