Life of Pi (4/5 Stars)

“Life of Pi” the new movie continues director Ang Lee’s streak of making movies with extremely unlike settings. Take a look at this filmography: Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen’s England) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon  (Chinese martial arts) Hulk (American Comic Book), Brokeback Mountain (Gay Cowboy Love Story), and now Life of Pi, which is about an Indian teenager’s spiritual journey across the Pacific Ocean on a lifeboat with a Bengal Tiger. His next movie: Science Fiction comedy about an Australian moon colony. I’m calling it.

The movie “Life of Pi” has a particularly good hook to it. A failed writer is told to visit a man with an incredible story in order to become inspired for his next project. How incredible is this story? Well, the writer is told that it would “make you believe in God.” Talk about setting the bar high. Now it is to this movie’s credit that it is worth seeing even if that claim had been omitted based merely on the narrative of the story and the skillful way it is told. But just for fun, I will entertain a theological discussion at the end of this review.

Pi is played by Irrfan Khan whom you may remember as the police inspector in Slumdog Millionaire. His conversation with the writer narrates the story of him as a young man. Young Pi is played by Suraj Sharma in his first movie. Young Pi is a tourist of religions. He learns Hinduism from his mother, becomes baptized into Christianity, and prays with Muslims. His father, a zookeeper who swears by science, is not particularly fond of his son’s lack of conviction in what he believes and instructs Pi to choose one and be done with it. Pi does not seem to understand why he cannot believe in everything at once. A few years later his father announces to his family his plans to move his zoo to Canada and start a new life there. Everyone, animals too, pile onto a huge cargo ship for the great journey across the Pacific Ocean. A huge storm inks the ship leaving only Pi and a Bengal Tiger named Richard Parker and a few other soon to be eaten animals as the survivors.

And here this movie made by a lesser director would easily falter because there is admittedly not much to do in the middle of the ocean even if you’ve got a tiger along for the journey. Let’s face it; there are not all that many types of interactions to explore within the confines of plausible reality. The principle character can’t have intelligent conversations and there is certainly nowhere to go. Most people thought the book this movie was based on was unfilmable. This movie accomplishes two main things that allow it to avoid the boredom trap. One: The tiger is beautifully made and rendered with whatever effects it needed (I don’t know) to make it a true character in the story not only in terms of physical actions but also in terms of plausible wild animal emotion as opposed to cartoony schtick. Two: the movie has gorgeous cinematography, which is used in such a way as to provide the story with visual chapters. Sure everything takes place on the ocean, but depending on where the story is, the ocean looks much different. There are scenes during dark and powerful storms, scenes during serenely still golden hours, and a particularly picturesque scene at night with thousands of glowing jellyfish just underneath the water. Not to mention the way the camera moves effortlessly through the air and ocean around the lifeboat. Certainly this is the best use of 3D since “Avatar” came out almost three years ago. That is a huge compliment from me because the list of movies that I’ve seen where I felt the 3D actually added to the experience (and more importantly was worth the surcharge) is only two movies long: Avatar and now Life of Pi. This is a very good-looking movie and should have a lock on a nomination for Best Cinematography.

Okay, let’s talk Theology and here we cannot help but have spoilers. I am of the opinion that knowing the twist at the end would not actually harm the experience of watching the movie. I knew of the twist before I saw it and it did not bother me. Like I said the theology bookends are not needed for this to be a good movie. So here is the Twist: The entire story is made up. There is an epilogue where we learn that there was no Tiger. That the story Pi is telling is actually a metaphor or something to represent a much darker story about a bunch of people on a lifeboat that acted like true animals (cannibalism!) to survive the long journey across the ocean after the boat sank. The writer asks Pi why he would make up that story and then tell him the truth. Pi explains that he just told the writer two stories about basically the same thing: One was the long and beautiful Tiger story and the other a short and depressing true story. Which does the writer prefer, Pi asks. The writer says he prefers the first story. “So,” says Pi, “it is the same with God.”

And now here is where I would be confused about the hook because the movie seems to be making the case that God is a part of our imagination that we utilize to give us comfort in a wild and wretched world and if that is the case than how is this story supposed to make me believe in God? I am probably am missing the larger point as I generally do in these types of conversations. By the way, I like the first story better too, but just because you like something better does not make it truer. And isn’t the truth, though perhaps depressing, more important than something made up, though hopeful and meaningful. And at this point in these conversations there comes a point where an even more interesting question comes to fruition.

What is an easier to do: To find God or to deny God. Does it take more strength to find a loving God in a wild and wretched world or to deny him and live in a wild and wretched world without God? What are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to even choose? And if so, are we supposed to choose the hard path? What’s wrong with choosing the easy path whichever it is? This type of thing is worth thinking about from time to time.

Religion provides a moral framework in a world that cannot be scientifically proven to have one.  In that sense it is extremely important and one of the true things that separate humans from wild animals. But on the other hand, you can’t progress in knowledge without first admitting there are things unknown, and God is most definitely one of those things. Let me give an example of this.

There is a building in Rome called the Pantheon. The Romans built it as a temple way back in the day. It was characterized by a huge stonewalls and a dome with a huge hole at the top. In medieval times, the Christians used the building as a church. During Mass even though it may have been raining or snowing outside, it never rained through the hole in the roof. The Christians attributed this particular phenomenon to God. God liked people in church praying, so he blessed each mass with dryness even though storms were raging outside. I admit that’s a pretty good miracle. But there is a scientific explanation to it. Because there were always so many people in the Pantheon during mass, and because human beings are warm-blooded and give off heat, and since heat rises, and there was no other place for the heat to go except out of the big hole in the roof, the reason why no one ever got wet was because the heat rising from the congregation evaporated the rain before it could get in. When there was no mass (i.e. no people) it definitely rained in the Pantheon. But for centuries it was just taken as a given that God was stopping the rain. We have a huge tendency to point to something we don’t understand and call it a miracle when we simply do not understand how it works. And this is a universal thing. Neil Degrasse Tyson calls this “The God of the Gaps” and in a lecture that you can easily find on YouTube points out that great scientists like Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Isaac Newton made this very error themselves. They attributed phenomenon that they did not understand in astronomy to God because they did not feel they ever could understand it. So unfortunately they did not try to understand it and the task of understanding it fell to future scientists, who fortunately for the progress of mankind, they did.

My take on it: Fictional stories are nice and warm and fuzzy but they cannot be getting in the way of figuring out new stuff. We have a lot more work still left to do. If God has a problem with that, he can come down and explain to us the mysteries of the universe himself and by that I mean in a way that can be scientifically verified, not via pancakes or wall stains or metaphorical parables. It sure would save us all a lot of time and trouble.