This weekend I went with my family to the movies. My mom wanted to see “Life of Pi,” but I was skeptical to say the least. The commercials featured such clichés, as “my greatest enemy became my greatest friend” and generally looked like the classic lost-at-sea story meets feel-good animal story. I arrived at the theater expecting to be bored, but the movie I saw was anything but boring.
I am not the average moviegoer. I am not a big TV watcher or video game player, but I love to watch movies. I have been known to take myself to the movies and enjoy analyzing plot lines and characters and have harsh standards. I have never been a fan of animal movies. They seem to fall into a formula that ends with the dog dying or the horse being shot. In “Life of Pi,” animals play a central role, but there is more to the animals than initially meet the eye.
The movie follows the life of Piscine, which means swimming pool in French, as his family sells its zoo in India and boards a ship for Canada. En route, tragedy strikes and the ship sinks. Pi, as he prefers to be called, manages to board a lifeboat and is joined by an injured zebra, an orangutan, a hyena and a tiger named Richard Parker. Through a series of events, only Pi and Richard Parker are left alive. The unlikely duo fight to establish territory on the small lifeboat, eventually becoming allies. They travel through storms, fight off starvation by eating flying fish, land on a mysterious, floating carnivores’ island and eventually reach civilization.
The movie is family friendly. In the way “Finding Nemo” does not show Nemo’s mom’s death, “Life of Pi” never shows death or violence on screen, but instead shows it through the main character’s reactions.
The movie travels in between the believable and surreal in a way that would appear corny if a creative director such as Ang Lee did not direct it. Lee has directed other artistic movies like “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon” and “Brokeback Mountain,” but this might be his finest work yet. “Life of Pi” shows that Ang Lee does not have to make a controversial movie about gay cowboys to make a memorable movie. Few directors can pull off a sequence of a character looking at a sunken ship at the bottom of the glowing ocean and still keep the audience grounded in reality. The true beauty of the movie is that there are plenty of moments for over-analyzing and philosophizing, but the story also can be taken at face value.
For hardcore moviegoers or people looking for a study break, “Life of Pi” is sure to be a cinematic treat.
