The Book:
This fantasy-adventure, coming-of-age novel was published in 2001. It’s more than 300 page and told in a first person narrative, set in 1970’s Pondicherry, India before the main character is adrift at sea In the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps because of the heavily spiritual content, Martel’s novel was rejected five times before being picked up by Knopf Canada (“top publishers rejected Booker winner,” www.theguardian.co.uk). The range of subject matter covers Indian culture, survival tips for being lost at sea, animal psychology, zoology, loss of innocence, and even major religions.
Life of Pi is initially written from the unnamed author’s point of view, as he searches for the perfect story after his previous novel’s flop. In this prologue, the author meets an Indian living in Canada who has a tremendous story that would, according to someone, “make you believe in God.” From then on, the novel is read through a first-person account from the Indian man, Pi Patel. The unnamed author is nearly forgotten save for the short, one-page-or-less, italicized introduction to chapters in the book.
In any case, the voice of Pi (full name, Piscine Patel) is a delightful tone for a memoir. “He” paints the picture of his childhood beautifully, in episodes ranging from how he learned to swim, to his father’s lesson about the dangerous instinct of animals (Pi’s father managed a zoo in Pondicherry, India), to a rather humorous interest in several religions at once. These episodes set up how Pi inexplicably is able to survive in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra and a tiger.
I have been to India and have noticed how “English-ized” part of an English-speaking Indian man’s language is. Words like “scoundrel,” “bamboozle” and “rather” pop through the pages. Just as rampant are Pi’s older, wiser self, detailing his teen memories. His recollection of drinking clean water after the first three days of survival are painfully yet deliciously felt thorough every word expressed, a balance between joy in something simple as drinking water and a random side-note reminding us of his morality: “I tell you, to be drunk on alcohol is disgraceful, but to be drunk on water is noble and ecstatic” (page 143).
This story really does make one believe in God. The talk of religion, especially from a teenage boy, strikes as a surprise from a mostly atheist, if not nonbelieving generation. It’s harmless, and even inspiring. Pi manages to not only fall in love with Christianity, when he talks about seeing the Virgin Mary or realizing how a self-sacrificing, wounded Christ on the Cross displays a vulnerability not found in any of the 3 million Hindu gods, but Islam, too. He asks his parents for a prayer rug to pray to Allah several hours a day. There’s humor, too, that perhaps culturally, from a white person, would be seen as prejudiced and inappropriate. India is home to dozens of major religions, and hundreds of languages. In the case of diversity, India makes America look like a Little League country.
The stories of Pi’s life in India make the survival of the shipwreck feel like a real wound. We feel his loss of his family and the animals. We wish he had never moved to Canada. The first mention of selling the animals off to zoos and preparing for the move hit us with a sense of foreboding.
Pi’s connection to the tiger, Richard Parker, is something the reader is initially disbelieving. Judging by the bulk of the novel, one wonders what kind of (and how many) adventures two people of different species can experience together while being stranded in an empty environment. As Pi eventually succumbs to physical and mental deterioration, exhaustion, starvation, and especially hopelessness, the reader, who sits in this contemporary, bustling new millennium, will part from this book feeling not at all liberated (as books often have the reputation of doing). The reader will definitely look around his or her room and imagine how reality could bend, or how time can stretch so greatly to the point where it is almost painful. Like Richard Parker, though, the feeling will be temporary, and the reader will unceremoniously move past this knowledge and simply carry on to the next adventure.
The Movie:
Ang Lee’s latest cinematic wonder was released in November 2012 to precede December’s much-hyped flicks, namely The Hobbit. Life of Pi is lucky to be commended alongside Argo, Lincoln, and whatever’s up for the Oscar season. If it at all wins Best Picture, it would be the first live-action 3D feature film to do so. It would certainly mark the new century of filmmaking.
The film’s technical impact didn’t fool everyone, though. David Thompson’s article “Life of Pi’s Clumsy 3D Storytelling” in The New Republic sheds a very blunt light on what is seen as an overwhelming amount of special effects. The colors are “ravishing” and the overall meaning of the story is lost, particularly because of the exposition of Pi’s childhood in Pondicherry. This exposition did make up roughly 70 of the book’s 300 pages, but considering how the bulk of the novel is set at sea, where admittedly little conflicts come their way, the exposition is not meant to be treated as boring.
Hardly anything (maybe less than 10% of the text) is left out: arguably obscure parts about the writer with the failed novel, who heard about older Pi living in Canada, were included.
The series of background information stories in Part One, as Pi grew up in Pondicherry, were so well-written from older Pi’s point of view. They made Pi’s life in India very vibrant. I enjoyed it – I think for an American to read a book that takes place in a foreign land, especially if the narrator or young protagonist is foreign, then the English translation makes the point of view lost, somehow – as if the reader, whether they are American or German or Chinese, forget about what it was like for Pi to grow up as a vegetarian all his life, or knowing all the Hindu gods, or having a brother that plays cricket. Reminding the viewer through film makes the cultural setting really stick.
A lot of the novel’s ingredients fought for attention, and Lee managed to install as much of the essential parts while leaving out others. For instance, the character of the writer who wants to tell Older Pi’s story could have been extended to the book’s measurements, but thankfully wasn’t. The writer becoming interested in a story that, as Pi’s uncle claims will make him “believe in God,” is really directed to the audience. The purpose of the writer is simply to show the reader how Older Pi has changed from his experience at sea. That’s about it.
The adapted screenplay did add a romantic interest that wasn’t present in the book. This is often a typical addition, but one that literal purists are not swayed by. It should have been skipped, regardless of appeasing to the purity of the text or not. Is giving Pi a temporary crush done to assure the viewer of his masculinity?
The tiger’s animation is as close to immaculate as animator and viewer can get. It’s obviously impossible to film a tiger as a main character in a boat, with a teenage boy, with no one else around, without the technology we have today. I dare any Luddite to say that the animation of the magnificent predator was unnecessary or unbelievable. It was so subtle – it wasn’t flashy or obvious. Everything from the muscle movement as the tiger bared its teeth, including flaring whiskers and glowing eyes, was subdued without taking anything away from what makes a tiger; by that I mean its unfailing ferocity. The tiger is a killer, an animal that holds no instinct back.
The taming scene was crucial. Watching the way the “fake” tiger moved, from outward display of dominance to nervous snarling, was entrancing. The several efforts it took to make Richard Parker submit were exhausting, and regardless of whether I knew what was going to happen, I was still enthralled.
On a side note, I’ve heard that animal trainers do not teach their animals to roar, or display any hostility, because it could possibly trigger actual hostility in the animal. Richard Parker is so expressive that the line between animal and character blur too much for a live-action film, and a tiger’s genuine moods all collectively look “pissed off.” It begs the question how to make a dangerous animal look provoked, if not to provoke it.
The violence is brief (it is rated PG for kids), but it is presented. The idea that animals, even zoo animals, are not at all tamed or humanized, needs to be shown to child audiences. It’s done with the right amount of reality that would shock but not traumatize the younger viewer, balancing the detachment of a National Geographic film of a hunt, and with the removal of goriness.
A zebra is eaten alive. In the book, the description is sickeningly, pitifully detailed. The zebra is still alive after it has been eaten, and dies a few days after its stomach is ripped out. The hyena is annoying, and its noises don’t sound familiar, but then again how many people know for real what a hyena sounds like under stress on a boat?
I was expecting, after Pi had been rescued, and is telling his story to the Japanese insurance agents, that his recreated story featuring the cook, the injured sailor, and his mother (replacing the hyena, the zebra, the orangutan) would be shown on film. French actor Gerard Depardieu played the ship’s cook in the film before the shipwreck, but for a two-minute scene in which he provokes Pi’s family by ignoring their vegetarian request while serving them. I would have liked to see a broken Pi telling the insurance agents the story, and after a sentence or two, a two-second-long shot would appear, recreating a flashback. For example, when Pi tells them about how the cook began to act maliciously, such as amputating the injured sailor’s leg for fish bait, a shot of the cook (Depardieu) could have flashed for a second, shocking the audience into reliving the violence in the form of a memory like Pi would have experienced.
The best I can compare this technique to is from the end of Brokeback Mountain, when Anne Hathaway’s character is telling a supposed lie of how Jake Gyllenhaal’s character died. Hathaway is relaying the possibly false account of how he died in an accident, but the super-quick shots, representing flashbacks, are of Gyllenhaal’s character attacked and killed by homophobic locals.
This jarring cinematic technique would have made the film’s tone less gentle, which I as a viewer would have preferred. But I forget that I am over twenty and that there is so much a younger audience member can take.
The boy who played Pi performed a difficult role. Humans are used to reacting from others. To put a sixteen-year-old boy stranded in the middle of the vast, empty Pacific Ocean, after losing his family to a shipwreck, and having his only company be dangerous, hungry, disoriented animals, is hardly something an actor can properly research – much less a young newcomer. I did not feel cheapened from his performance, though. The boy who played Pi was alert, confused, curious, wary, on edge, and desperate at the right times.
Seeing an older Pi in his mid-forties erased my previously inaccurate vision of him. I had imagined him older and even silvered from time and trauma that stuck with him over the years. To see an everyday human, like I would see him in a home or on the street, was a reprieve. Older Pi is played by Bollywood actor Irrfan Khan, whose cameos include Slumdog Millionaire and The Amazing Spider-Man.
Often, though, the star of the show was Richard Parker. Just watching the computerized creature move, or huff through his cavernous mouth, was a wonder. It was better than Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia. Things like the slow roving turn of his heavy head, to his flickering candlelight-amber eyes, to his drawn-back muscles around his rearing spine, was so carefully assembled. Computer animation has come a long way. I knew this just by watching Transformers; the animators took every part of each vehicle’s part and made it into a “body” part. Seriously, watch them tumble and lock into place, and never mind the Michael Bay overwhelm-ness of trumpets and parting skies.
There wasn’t a lot of music to excite the boredom of being at sea. There was “overheard” dialogue of Young Pi and Older Pi talking. I think the scenes with the Writer and Older Pi were done to keep the audience active. I didn’t need it as much. Life of Pi was said to be un-filmable after all, so it does need a boost of human interaction.
The camera did some funky work where people in the present talked while the setting faded to a new backdrop of a scene. For example, Older Pi sitting in his living room would be on the screen, and then the background of his living room would fade out to the Pacific Ocean where Young Pi lay prostrate on the boat with boredom. I haven’t seen the technique in years, so I’m not quite sure what to make of it.
Artistic license was taken when new scenes were introduced. How else to show the passage of time? Slow black-to fade-in shots worked well.
What was noticeably removed from the film was a key scene in which Pi begins to hallucinate. Pi actually reveals to the reader that, as his time at sea goes farther than he can physically cope with, he thinks of ways to make time pass quicker. These methods include asphyxiation. It was probably removed to spare the young viewers from how teens can perform self-harm, but another reason why the scene was discouraged from the film could have been because Pi is temporarily blind. In the scene, Pi communicates with who he thinks is another castaway, oddly with a French accent. Pi attempts to help the other castaway onto the boat, but Pi hears Richard Parker killing him. As Pi’s physical and mental condition deteriorates, a blurring reality becomes difficult to translate. There’s also the scene in which Pi and Richard Parker land on the carnivorous island (which even I was a little lost while reading).
There’s a collective agreement that ambiguity doesn’t sit well with audiences. Did someone die or not? Did the accused murderer actually commit the crime, or did he pretend he committed it? Obviously Pi would have gone stir-crazy while being at sea for 227 days. Hallucinatory scenes have the potential to test the creative boundaries of cinematic special effects, but not at the expense of the protagonist’s mental well-being. So Pi can dream about the zoo animals dancing in the water, or his mother’s face in the stars, but that’s about it (unfortunately).
Coming-of-age stories, in books and movies alike, are meant to compromise adolescents’ innocence. It is the preferred way for children to learn firsthand about death, violence, sexuality, and other human trials as opposed to experiencing them on their own. Perhaps this twenty-three-year-old’s perspective of this movie is plenty unsurprised by these themes, as opposed to a preteen’s.
This is How They Roll 