Overview
The story of an Indian boy named Pi, a zookeeper's son who finds himself in the company of a hyena, zebra, orangutan, and a Bengal tiger after a shipwreck sets them adrift in the Pacific Ocean.
Please note that there *might* be a spoiler here. I say might because I’m not sure if you’d interpret the following as being detrimental to the viewing experience. In a way this question is not unlike what is about to be discussed. The answer to “is this a spoiler” may depend on how your answer to the bigger question. I hope that this sparks some good conversation. It is been a while since I’ve written something that is this black and white. Maybe the blog about unfulfilled love being the only real love?
The film Life of Pi is a terribly overrated film. Wait, I take that back – the first hour and fifty five minutes are dull. The last five minutes save the day, even though they essentially nullify everything that we had just witnessed. Confused? Lets get to it.
The film begins with a writer having dinner with a man he had just met. The writer had been told that this man had a story that would make the writer believe in God. The man then proceeds to tell the story in excruciating detail. I love slow, artsy movies but I found myself looking at my watch midway through the movie. As a young boy the man had a love for religion and he was a follower of all of them (I’ve heard of cafeteria-style religious belief. This kid bought the whole store). His father – a man of reason, logic and science – loathed religion and urged his son to pick one because one as it was absurd to follow all of them. The boy eventually lost his stomache for religion and seemingly became an agnostic/atheist (we see him reading Dostoyevsky)
Against the wishes of the boy the father decides to move the family to Canada to start a new life. This movie is significant as it involves packing up their animals (they owned a mini-zoo) and and transporting everyone across the Pacific on the boat. During a rough storm the ship sinks and only the boy, a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a tiger survive the tragedy. Amazingly, all of them end up in a life raft. As you might expect, this arrangement can’t last long. Over the course of the first couple of days the hyena eats the very passive zebra and then the orangutan. As he finishes off the orangutan the tiger (who had disappeared for a long stretch) comes out and kills the hyena. The tiger and the boy then do a dance over the next few weeks on the open ocean before making peace with each other. There are a few heartwarming tales mixed in – more on those in a bit.
So after the better part of a year they land in South America. As the boy struggles ashore he sees the tiger limp into the woods without so much as a glance back at him. The boy relays his incredible story to some investigators from the shipping company, and they tell him that they can’t take that story back to the company because it is simply unbelievable. They ask the boy if he can tell them a different story, and he obliges.
The boy tells the story of how the ship sank and he found himself on the life raft with his mother, the ship’s cook (with whom his father had an ugly exchange the day before) and a Buddhist. Within a day the cook killed the Buddhist, and the next day he killed the boy’s mother. The boy had watched the Buddhist die without flinching but he finally acted as his mother passed away. He killed the cook.
If you paid attention you probably realized that the new story was actually the same as the original story. The difference this time was that the cook was the hyena, the Buddhist was the zebra and the orangutan was his mother. The tiger was the boy, or rather the boy’s animalistic/survival persona.
The film then cuts back to the writer and the storyteller. The writer asks the man which story is the truth, and the man asks the writer which story he preferred.
“I prefer the first story” the writer answers.
“And so it is with God” answers the man.
Those six words made this whole dopey film worthwhile on soooooo many levels.
Before I get to the good stuff I’d like to address the issues I had with the film. Besides being rather dull, the entire first part of the film was a lie. It never happened. This alleged heartwarming tale was a myth concocted by a boy to protect himself from the carnage in which he was both a witness and a participant. Saying that this was a heartwarming tale between a boy and a tiger is like saying that Bruce Willis had a great relationship with his wife in The Sixth Sense. It was a one-sided relationship because – spoiler alert – he was dead. It takes two to have a relationship. In both films the relationship was imaginary and one-sided. This wouldn’t matter if the film had aspired to be a true survival story, or a coming-of-age story. Hell, even Castaway was a better film.
So back to the main question. When the writer posed the all important “what would you like to believe” question, I actually gasped out loud. In that simple question lives everything that I’ve struggled to convey about my own personal beliefs.
What would you like to believe?
Yes, exactly! There are only two answers to this question: 1) The truth or 2) What I want to be true.
I can’t fathom living in a world where I believed the first story to be true because I wanted it to be true. In every fiber of my being I want to be as honest and authentic and real as I can be. I may be wrong about lots of things but my position will never be the result of wish-thinking. I’d love to believe that when a loved one dies that I am going to see them again soon. I’d love to believe that if I chew on the right tea leaves that a bad illness would go away. I’d love to believe that I can give a woman that looks like Little Steven $100 in order to find out what is in my future (if it is a good day she will re-enact the scene where Adrianna was dragged into the Jersey woods).
The film is also an example the theory known as Occam’s Razor: Simply put, the truth is always the most plausible explanation. As the animals were piling into the boat I thought to myself “Really??????”. When I heard the second story I thought “ok, that makes sense”. It didn’t have the heartwarming drudgery that the first story had but at the same time it didn’t insult my intelligence. I didn’t have to believe in things that go against nature or common sense. Waters didn’t part, bushes didn’t burn, snakes didn’t talk.
I probably have not adequately captured how I felt about the film in this blog but I will say that I was really moved. It just seemed so…. perfect. Wrapped up on a nice, neat package. Which story do you prefer? Well, which story do you prefer?
IHATEBadMovies.com reviews Life of Pi
Movie title: Life of Pi
Movie description: The story of an Indian boy named Pi, a zookeeper's son who finds himself in the company of a hyena, zebra, orangutan, and a Bengal tiger after a shipwreck sets them adrift in the Pacific Ocean.
Date published: 2013-03-02
Director(s): Ang Lee
Actor(s): Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Ayush Tandon, Gautam Belur, Adil Hussain, Tabu, Ayaan Khan, Mohd Abbas Khaleeli, Vibish Sivakumar, Rafe Spall, Gérard Depardieu, James Saito, Jun Naito, Andrea Di Stefano, Shravanthi Sainath, Elie Alouf, Padmini Ramachandran, T.M. Karthik, Amarendran Ramanan, Hari Mina Bala, Wang Bo-Chieh
Genre: Adventure, Drama, Action
My Review
Please note that there *might* be a spoiler here. I say might because I’m not sure if you’d interpret the following as being detrimental to the viewing experience. In a way this question is not unlike what is about to be discussed. The answer to “is this a spoiler” may depend on how your answer to the bigger question. I hope that this sparks some good conversation. It is been a while since I’ve written something that is this black and white. Maybe the blog about unfulfilled love being the only real love?
The film Life of Pi is a terribly overrated film. Wait, I take that back – the first hour and fifty five minutes are dull. The last five minutes save the day, even though they essentially nullify everything that we had just witnessed. Confused? Lets get to it.
The film begins with a writer having dinner with a man he had just met. The writer had been told that this man had a story that would make the writer believe in God. The man then proceeds to tell the story in excruciating detail. I love slow, artsy movies but I found myself looking at my watch midway through the movie. As a young boy the man had a love for religion and he was a follower of all of them (I’ve heard of cafeteria-style religious belief. This kid bought the whole store). His father – a man of reason, logic and science – loathed religion and urged his son to pick one because one as it was absurd to follow all of them. The boy eventually lost his stomache for religion and seemingly became an agnostic/atheist (we see him reading Dostoyevsky)
Against the wishes of the boy the father decides to move the family to Canada to start a new life. This movie is significant as it involves packing up their animals (they owned a mini-zoo) and and transporting everyone across the Pacific on the boat. During a rough storm the ship sinks and only the boy, a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a tiger survive the tragedy. Amazingly, all of them end up in a life raft. As you might expect, this arrangement can’t last long. Over the course of the first couple of days the hyena eats the very passive zebra and then the orangutan. As he finishes off the orangutan the tiger (who had disappeared for a long stretch) comes out and kills the hyena. The tiger and the boy then do a dance over the next few weeks on the open ocean before making peace with each other. There are a few heartwarming tales mixed in – more on those in a bit.
So after the better part of a year they land in South America. As the boy struggles ashore he sees the tiger limp into the woods without so much as a glance back at him. The boy relays his incredible story to some investigators from the shipping company, and they tell him that they can’t take that story back to the company because it is simply unbelievable. They ask the boy if he can tell them a different story, and he obliges.
The boy tells the story of how the ship sank and he found himself on the life raft with his mother, the ship’s cook (with whom his father had an ugly exchange the day before) and a Buddhist. Within a day the cook killed the Buddhist, and the next day he killed the boy’s mother. The boy had watched the Buddhist die without flinching but he finally acted as his mother passed away. He killed the cook.
If you paid attention you probably realized that the new story was actually the same as the original story. The difference this time was that the cook was the hyena, the Buddhist was the zebra and the orangutan was his mother. The tiger was the boy, or rather the boy’s animalistic/survival persona.
The film then cuts back to the writer and the storyteller. The writer asks the man which story is the truth, and the man asks the writer which story he preferred.
“I prefer the first story” the writer answers.
“And so it is with God” answers the man.
Those six words made this whole dopey film worthwhile on soooooo many levels.
Before I get to the good stuff I’d like to address the issues I had with the film. Besides being rather dull, the entire first part of the film was a lie. It never happened. This alleged heartwarming tale was a myth concocted by a boy to protect himself from the carnage in which he was both a witness and a participant. Saying that this was a heartwarming tale between a boy and a tiger is like saying that Bruce Willis had a great relationship with his wife in The Sixth Sense. It was a one-sided relationship because – spoiler alert – he was dead. It takes two to have a relationship. In both films the relationship was imaginary and one-sided. This wouldn’t matter if the film had aspired to be a true survival story, or a coming-of-age story. Hell, even Castaway was a better film.
So back to the main question. When the writer posed the all important “what would you like to believe” question, I actually gasped out loud. In that simple question lives everything that I’ve struggled to convey about my own personal beliefs.
What would you like to believe?
Yes, exactly! There are only two answers to this question: 1) The truth or 2) What I want to be true.
I can’t fathom living in a world where I believed the first story to be true because I wanted it to be true. In every fiber of my being I want to be as honest and authentic and real as I can be. I may be wrong about lots of things but my position will never be the result of wish-thinking. I’d love to believe that when a loved one dies that I am going to see them again soon. I’d love to believe that if I chew on the right tea leaves that a bad illness would go away. I’d love to believe that I can give a woman that looks like Little Steven $100 in order to find out what is in my future (if it is a good day she will re-enact the scene where Adrianna was dragged into the Jersey woods).
The film is also an example the theory known as Occam’s Razor: Simply put, the truth is always the most plausible explanation. As the animals were piling into the boat I thought to myself “Really??????”. When I heard the second story I thought “ok, that makes sense”. It didn’t have the heartwarming drudgery that the first story had but at the same time it didn’t insult my intelligence. I didn’t have to believe in things that go against nature or common sense. Waters didn’t part, bushes didn’t burn, snakes didn’t talk.
I probably have not adequately captured how I felt about the film in this blog but I will say that I was really moved. It just seemed so…. perfect. Wrapped up on a nice, neat package. Which story do you prefer? Well, which story do you prefer?
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My Review - 7/10
7/10