This is grand adventure on an epic scale, a survival story that takes up half the movie. It’s no Peaceable Kingdom like Edward Hicks’s charming early 19th-century painting, where the lion sleeps with the lamb. This is a Darwinian place that Pi must learn to command. Using state-of-the-art 3D and digitally created beasts, Lee and his team of technicians make it utterly real, as they do a mysterious island that briefly provides a dangerously seductive haven. The 227 days at sea are a test of physique, mental adaptation and faith, and Suraj Sharma makes Pi’s spiritual journey as convincing as his nautical one.
He confronts thirst and starvation, finds a modus vivendi with the fierce tiger, endures and wonders at a mighty storm, a squadron of flying fish, a humpbacked whale, a school of dolphins, a night illuminated by luminous jellyfish. This brave new world is observed by a young Chilean director of photography, appropriately named Claudio Miranda. The movie does for water and the sea what Lawrence of Arabia did for sand and desert, and one thinks of what Alfred Hitchock, who used 3D so imaginatively in his 1954 film of Dial M For Murder, might have done on his wartime Lifeboat had he been given such technical facilities.
This poetic Life of Pi concludes with a fascinating, deliberately prosaic coda that raises questions about the reality of what we’ve seen and confronts the teleological issues involved. One thinks of the reporter’s remark at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” At another level, Sam Goldwyn’s advice to the screenwriter comes to mind: “Give me the story and send the message by Western Union.”
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