Life of Pi
No one can doubt the technical brilliance of Ang Lee's new film, an adaptation of Yann Martel's Booker-winning bestseller from 2001, a widely acclaimed book that I should say I have yet to read. The effects are stunning, more impressive than anything in the new hi-tech Hobbit, and on that score, Peter Jackson can eat his heart out. But for the film itself, despite some lovely images and those eyepopping effects, it is a shallow and self-important shaggy-dog story – or shaggy-tiger story – and I am bemused by the saucer-eyed critical responses it's been getting.
Pi is Pi Patel, played as a teenager by Suraj Sharma and as an adult by Irrfan Khan, and it is the adult Pi we see recounting his story to an inquisitive author (Rafe Spall), who yearns to hear something that will cure his writer's block. Pi tells him it might do more: it might enable him to believe in God. As a teen, Pi and his family journeyed by steamer from India to Canada, where his father hoped to restart his business as a zookeeper, and he brought his zoo animals with him. A storm wrecks the ship, and Pi finally finds himself all alone on a lifeboat with an adult Bengal tiger; in the existential ordeal that follows, Pi and the tiger face the battle to survive.
The digitally created tiger is incredible, or rather, very credible. I expected it to be an obvious CGI beast or uncanny-valley creature. It's better than that. Every second it was on screen, I thought: that unreal tiger really is mindblowingly real-looking – how did they do that? Well, I suspended my disbelief in good faith – and my scepticism about "magic realism" also – and Lee's brilliant digital work made that easy. But the adventures of Pi and the tiger are cancelled by an exasperating ending, the crux of which is a question Pi asks Rafe Spall's writer, and the answer he receives. Both seem founded on some fatuous assumptions. This is an awards-season movie if ever there was one. It deserves every technical prize going.
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