All at sea with Richard Parker

# 63

   In Ang Lee’s film of The Life of Pi[1], a writer (Rafe Spall) has journeyed to Canada from India on the promise of a story that will make him believe in God. In Montreal the grown-up Pi Patel, now a philosophy don, tells him two biographical stories and suggests he choose whichever he prefers.  The stories are similar but mutually exclusive; they cannot both be true. It is possible that neither is entirely true and that neither is entirely fiction. Pi[2] is our exclusive source for both stories. He emerges from both as the sole primate to have survived the sinking of a Japanese ship whose cargo resembled that of Noah’s Ark. In the subsidiary version, as the ship capsizes at night during a terrible storm, Pi is initially joined in the lifeboat by his mother, by a Buddhist sailor with a broken leg and by the ship’s cook. In the principal version we have Pi in the same lifeboat along with a zebra (also with a broken leg), a spotted hyena, a female orang-utan and a Bengal tiger (oh, and a rat). In this tale, the hyena kills both the zebra and the orang-utan before himself being killed (and eaten – along with the rat) by the tiger. Strangely, for all this carnage and for all the movie’s attention to detail, no bones, animal hides nor any faecal matter are ever seen in the lifeboat. Pi and the tiger do try pissing at each other at one point, but that is just because Pi is experimenting with ways to demarcate his territory.

 

Pi on the raft, Richard Parker in the lifeboat

   Eventually, Pi and the tiger reach the shore of Mexico having survived each other and the Pacific Ocean for 227 days[3]. In the purely anthropic version, the Buddhist sailor replaces the zebra, Pi’s mother doubles for the orang-utan and the cook’s actions are those of a hyena. The cook’s cannibalistic depredations drive Pi’s wilder self to imitate the actions of a Bengal tiger…Thus raising, in my mind at least, the possibility of an alternative ending in which it is Pi, alone, who finally walks into the Mexican jungle without a backward glance to the lifeboat.

   The Writer decides he prefers the version in which Pi manages, eventually, to co-exist in the lifeboat with the tiger. Chosen, he says, because “it is the better story.”

  “And so it goes with God,” agrees Pi without further elaboration. The assumption being, I suppose, that God at one time selected the best available stories as the basis for the various religions sampled by Pi in his youth; Hinduism, Catholic Christianity and Islam. Certainly, the story told by Pi shares with all religions that central requirement for us to believe in the unbelievable.  A smart choice by the Writer (and by God), you might think, given that the telling of Pi’s tiger story has by now consumed ninety percent of the CGI budget and filled the previous hour (or more) of screen-time. Visually, the cannibalistic, anthropocentric alternative is totally ignored. It seems only to have been offered by Pi, in desperation, when the ship-wreck investigators seemed less than convinced his ‘boy more-or-less tames tiger’ explanation.

   Throwing together a disparate group of travellers is a narrative device as old as the hills. In the movies, John Ford used it in Stagecoach (1939) and, a little closer to Pi, Alfred Hitchcock plunged-in with Lifeboat (1944). Assembled at random, travellers flung by the fates from a doomed ship into an open boat are unlikely to settle into a happy band of brothers and sisters, are they? When the dramatist adds to the natural perils of storm, thirst and imminent starvation, the human imperatives for greed, individual survival and social domination - an entirely happy outcome becomes distinctly unlikely. And so it nearly goes with Pi and Richard Parker[4] until, that is, Pi’s boundless ingenuity conditions the tiger’s behaviour and moderates his predatory instincts. The unique dramatic problem Ang Lee had to solve was how to sustain the narrative when there are only two characters on the screen, they are confined to an open boat (or nearby raft), and one of them doesn’t speak. His solution was twofold. The older Pi’s voice-over was added to explain the sequence of events and the power of 3D cinematography supplied all the visual interest and enhanced all the drama.

   The Life of Pi is the first feature film I have seen in 3D and the effects achieved are frequently spectacular. This is especially true when the tiger leaps out at us, or when other creatures seem suspended in the space between the audience and the screen. Strangely, though, the 3D experience was neither as satisfying nor as ‘realistic’ as I had expected. The technique gives such a very obviously enhanced version of ‘reality’ that it begins to look ‘unreal’. Some of the most carefully prepared shots had a strange flatness in the depth dimension. At times, I was reminded of a children’s toy theatre where cardboard cut-outs of scenery can be tabbed into the stage. The intention is to create an illusion of perspective; the result is to give an unnatural, layered, effect to every scene. Our eyes perceive depth gradually and not in such an artificially stratified way. Cinematic 3D tends to suggest there are intervals of ‘dead ground’ separating objects which otherwise appear to be in the near, middle and far distance.

   Having said that, The Life of Pi is entirely worth seeing for the beguiling beauty achieved in some of its images: the clarity of objects set apart on still water, the night sky reflected in the ocean, gashes of phosphorescence illuminating myriad sea creatures, gliding and leaping fish…These all served to relieve the repetition and growing tedium of the tiger-in-the-lifeboat saga as spun by the mature Pi from the kitchen of his Montreal apartment. It’s the odder of the two stories but it is sometimes spectacularly told.

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[1] Yann Martel’s novel The Life of Pi was published in 2001 and won the Man Booker prize for fiction in 2002. The film version (2012) is directed by Ang Lee from a screenplay by David Magee.

[2] Pi is played by different actors as he ages from infancy to maturity. Suraj Sharma is brilliant as Pi in the boat and Irrfan Khan is the contemporary, storytelling, Pi in Canada.

[3] I think the figure of 227 days must come from the book; in the movie it’s just a long time – and it seems like it.

[4] According to Wikipedia, Martel obtained the (tiger’s) name of ‘Richard Parker’ from maritime records of shipwrecks and subsequent cannibalism among the survivors. In the 1884 case involving the yacht Mignonette, one Richard Parker seems to have been the victim rather than the cannibal.