REVIEW
Life of Pi
Starring: Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan and Adil Hussain
Where: Cineplex Oden Victoria, Empire University 4, Silver City
Directed by: Ang Lee
Parental guidance: Some scary sequences
Rating: 5 (out of five)
The credits unfurl against the odd gaits and funny muzzles of the beasts in an Indian zoo, photographed in miraculously tactile 3-D. By the time they've finished, you know that Life of Pi is going to take you someplace splendid.
From those opening moments, the director, Ang Lee, makes clear his intention: To amaze.
Life of Pi, which opened the 50th New York Film Festival on Friday, tells the story of a shipwrecked boy and a Bengal tiger alone on the ocean together.
Its Robinson Crusoe charm and excitement come from the boy's resourcefulness in keeping himself and the tiger alive in their drifting boat, and in gaining the animal's respect so that it won't eat him.
Yann Martel, the Canadian author who wrote the 2001 novel the movie is based on, made the story a parable about faith and the ways we perceive the divine. His vision and Lee's merge beautifully.
As a boy, Pi Patel is comically open to belief. By the time he boards the fatal freighter with his family, he has embraced Hinduism, Catholicism and Islam - all together; he doesn't see why he has to choose.
The movie's idea of these faiths is as bright and friendly and clean as the India of its opening scenes. But if it's consciously childlike on the plane of ideas, on the level of the senses it's overpowering.
A star-sprinkled sky above a sea phosphorescent with jellyfish brings to mind another night sky: the one that, in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, seemed to capture more stars than any camera ever had before.
And the story of a fatherless boy who gives his heart to a creature that isn't human recalls, of course, E.T. Throughout, early Steven Spielberg is Lee's point of reference: the simplicity of childhood combined with the most advanced (and delightful) film technology.
Putting this astronomically expensive machinery in the hands of a director as sensitive as Lee wasn't a complete gamble on the part of 20th Century Fo In addition to Brokeback Mountain and Sense and Sensibility, he also directed Hulk.
For the magnificent tiger, which truly is frightening, Lee worked with four animals, filming a library of movements and facial expressions for the digital artists to use as reference points.
(It's a little bit disappointing to learn that Suraj Sharma, the young actor who plays Pi with great conviction, was never actually alone in a boat with the beast.)
A whale rushing and leaping, a school of dolphins soaring, a sudden invasion of flying fish that comes on like a thunderstorm: Lee amazes.
The movie is so beautiful and, for anyone who loves animals, so emotional that it might have worked as a simple adventure story (which is how children will perceive it).
But then, I suspect, Lee wouldn't have found much reason to make it. As it is, you may not share his faith in God, but his faith in film lights every frame.
