Ang Lee makes a gripping sea adventure out of a boy and a tiger, with Suraj Sharma keeping the spectacle human. The religious explanations are less convincing, and too often interrupt what is already working.
Ang Lee’s Life of Pi is a gripping survival adventure that becomes less convincing when it tells us how to think about faith. Adapting Yann Martel’s novel, screenwriter David Magee gives the boy’s ordeal a running explanation that the images rarely need. The attraction is plain enough: Pi, played by Suraj Sharma, has to survive at sea alongside a tiger that has no reason to take his side. Lee makes that predicament absorbing, even when the philosophical commentary asks for more agreement than it has earned.
Irrfan Khan, as Adult Pi Patel, brings a welcome calm to the framing story, and Rafe Spall’s Writer gives him someone to address. Khan speaks with an ease that helps dialogue which can sound too ready for quotation. The childhood passages establish Pi’s religious curiosity, but Magee keeps telling us what to take from it. We understand early that belief matters, and the repeated reminders slow down an already leisurely introduction.
Once the survival story takes over, Sharma gives the film the immediate purpose it needs. He makes Pi’s vulnerability convincing, and the tiger’s independence is essential to the suspense. We were frightened for Pi because the animal beside him never acquires the reassuring expressions of a pet. The effects work succeeds in the difficult business of making us study a digital creature’s behaviour without constantly searching for the joins, and Sharma’s performance helps sustain that attention.
Claudio Miranda’s cinematography makes open water a place worth looking at for more than the promise of rescue. The scale of the sea keeps Pi small, while the careful framing stops the spectacular images from losing him altogether. Lee gives these expanses time to register, allowing us to take pleasure in looking even while the boy’s situation remains precarious. Occasionally the beauty becomes too comfortable, and the physical hardship seems further away than it ought to be.
The production design, credited to David Gropman and Marcelo Pont Vergés, keeps the shared space clear enough for us to judge the distance between boy and tiger. Tim Squyres’s editing is most effective in the quieter stretches, where patience makes us attend to the difficulty of simply remaining alive. There is no need to manufacture another emergency whenever the pace settles. For a survival film, this willingness to let us watch its central character endure, without demanding constant incident, is a considerable strength.
Mychael Danna’s score supports the adventure warmly, though its encouragement to feel reverent can be harder to accept. The same goes for the dialogue, which keeps explaining how Pi’s experience relates to his faith. Magee’s insistence on telling us what matters reduces the uncertainty that Sharma and the tiger make so compelling. There should be room for Pi’s beliefs without quite so much instruction about our own response, especially when the images have already held our attention so thoroughly.
It is worth giving these images a large screen, though Sharma’s performance matters at least as much as their scale. He gives this 127-minute adventure a reason to keep watching even when the talk grows laboured. Take it as a survival film and leave yourself free to disagree with the theology.
