That they were both nominated for Best Picture of 2012 in the
Academy Awards may obscure the fact that Life of Pi is in
one essential respect, at least, the opposite of Amour. In
the latter film, Michael Haneke is determined to look at both the
world and the question of religious belief with despair, whereas in
Life of Pi, Ang Lee is entirely on board with Yann
Martel’s equally determined but rather naive hopefulness. Both are
very well done, if rather one-sided, but they make a remarkable
pair of bookends for the problem of belief in our time.
Amour takes the cheer out of the cheerful atheism of
Richard Dawkins and company and so gives us a better idea of what
we’re really getting; Life of Pi is refreshingly
unapologetic about its gods while still preserving something of
their Old World (or Old Testament) savagery.
Mr. Lee brings enormous directorial skill and, with the help of
computer-generated imagery, visual artistry to a straightforward
attempt at myth-making. Kipling tried something like this in his
story “The Knife and the Naked Chalk,” as did John McTiernan’s
movie The
Thirteenth Warrior, though both were dealing with
established myths and purporting to explain them in naturalistic
terms. Life of Pi is more ambitious, creating an entirely
new myth out of a naturalistic story which is only revealed to us
at the end. Up until that point the myth, so splendidly
photographed and its story so well told, has things all its own
way. Young Pi (Suraj Sharma), aged about 16, emigrates with his
family and the zoo they have long owned in Pondicherry, India, to
Canada. The Japanese freighter on which they are crossing the
Pacific founders in a storm and Pi and a Bengal tiger named Richard
Parker are the sole survivors, uneasily sharing the same lifeboat
for weeks adrift as Pi by one means or another manages to avoid
becoming the tiger’s last meal.
Both boy and Bengal more than once touch the edge of despair and
oblivion, and for the former if not the latter this becomes a
quasi-mystical experience. Pi, already revealed to us as a
spiritually questing person with an allegiance of some kind to at
least three of the world’s major religions, takes these brushes
with the infinite as the occasion for reflections on life, the
universe and everything, but the upshot of all is a firm conviction
that one must never lose hope and that God’s Providence, thank God,
is little changed since the days when it stood that other shipwreck
victim, Robinson Crusoe, in such good stead. “Without Richard
Parker I would have died by now,” explains Pi. “Fear of him kept me
alert; tending to his needs gave my life focus.” What looked like
the blackest of fates became a spiritually transforming
experience.
All this story is told in flashback by the middle-aged Pi
(Irrfan Khan), now some kind of professor of religion, to an
interviewer (Rafe Spall) who has been told by someone else that
Pi’s story would compel belief in God. It doesn’t quite do that,
but at the conclusion of the story which the film has narrated for
us, Pi then tells him a quite different one — one which is duller
and less fraught with meaning but more in keeping with what we know
about worldly probabilities — and asks him which of the two stories
he prefers. Of course, we are as sure as he is to answer that it is
the one we have been watching for two hours, the enthralling one
with the boy and the Bengal tiger alone on a lifeboat together in
the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
“The tiger; that’s the better story.… And so it goes with God.”
Or rather, so God goes with it. Religion has always been a matter
of stories, as we are reminded by Pi’s early experiences with the
comic-book gods of the Hindus, and they tend to be stories with the
miracles left in that the Japanese insurance adjusters in this one
politely ask Pi to leave out. It’s not good to forget that, as
Kierkegaard suggested when he said that the stone rolled away from
Jesus’ tomb ought to be called the Philosopher’s Stone, as it has
perplexed the philosophers ever since. Yet philosophers are also
necessary to point out that, if belief is a matter of choice — the
tiger story is the one we like better, after all, not the one most
likely to be true — it doesn’t render questions of truth trivial or
irrelevant. Just out of the mesmerizing shot, as it were, in the
beautifully rendered Life of Pi, there is more than a hint
of the kind of flip postmodernism that thinks such questions are
meaningless.
Photo: UPI
