"Believing in everything is the same as believing in nothing," says Pi's father because Pi samples religions from Hinduism and Buddhism to Catholicism and Judaism and wants them all. Pi's relationship with tiger "Richard Parker" represents all mankind's struggle to live in harmony with the forces it cannot control. The conflict with the gross cook aboard the Japanese cargo ship taking Pi's family and animals to Canada is emblematic of the challenges facing the gifted with the groundlings. In the end, Lee is interested in the individual's place in the universe as he struggles to harness nature and yet live in harmony with these elements. Together with the impressive use of 3D, director Ang Lee has visually taken us from the opulence of Crouching Tiger and the minimalism of Brokeback Mountain into a fusion world of fancy and reality. The several formalistic shots of the boat at night are worthy of the best lighting in the best aquariums in the world. The opening scene in Pi's family zoo could be right out of Terence Malick's visionary camera, a montage of nature gorgeous in its simplicity.
The digital rendering of animals, especially the Bengal Tiger, is beautiful to behold. Ultimately the benign brotherhood of beasts and humans is affirmed not so much by lofty philosophy but by the necessity of man and beast working together to survive. The film begs interpretation from the multiplicity of religions to the place of mankind in a hostile, Darwinian world. While the framing device of a story told to a stranger uses the old flashback, the lonely lifeboat is as new as any story told in the last century. You will see no more imaginative film this year than Life of Pi, whose conceit of a young Indian boy stranded with a Bengal Tiger in a lifeboat amid the Pacific Ocean is fantastical yet real in its metaphoric implications. We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat." From Life of Pi by Yann Martel. ''It was not a question of him or me, but of him and me.
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