Life of Pi

I finally got around to watching Life of Pi last night. I had held off because I was wary of the whole magical realism, "Oh, isn't nature trippy" thing. But there is no need to worry. Ang Lee is an accomplished director who keeps the narrative moving along at a fast clip (his first Hollywood efforts -- Sense and Sensibility (1995) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) are terrific movies). And the "Oh, isn't nature trippy" moments are used sparingly and as punctuation in a white-knuckled action adventure story about survival in an open boat after a shipwreck on the high seas. And what makes the survival tale unusually riveting is that in the open boat with Pi Patel, the Tamil boy at the heart of Yann Martel's 2001 prize-winning novel that the film adapts, is an injured zebra, a bloodthirsty hyena, a benevolent orangutan, and of course the majestic and fierce Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. This is a thriller which puts us back in touch with the primordial terror we in all our urban, electronic sophistication have forgotten -- the terror of nature and the animal kingdom; and in this sense Life of Pi is far more thrilling than any James Bond or Batman blockbuster.

From the opening shots of animals languidly being animals in the zoo managed by Pi's family in Pondicherry, Ang Lee's intention is to reawaken our forgotten knowledge of animality. The underlying discussion this movie is engaged in is the connection between animality ("Nature" -- the many manifestations of the sublime) and religion. The acting is superb -- particularly Suraj Sharma, who we spend most of the movie with in the boat with Richard Parker -- and the computer animation seamless. This is definitely a movie worth watching.