If everyone’s being honest, Ang Lee isn’t that accomplished a director if you take Brokeback Mountain out of the equation. Most people can even take or leave Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. So, for there to be so much expectation for Life of Pi to be nothing short of mind-blowing seems a little unfair. It was always going to be a challenge to impressively adapt a book like Life of Pi, a book that calls on the reader to turn their imagination up to eleven in order to satisfy its visual curiosities. In terms of doing just that, Lee’s film succeeds sensationally, but at the expense of any sort of drama or emotion.
Life of Pi is, at best, above average filmmaking. But upon one viewing, it is hard not to feel like anything that lingers afterwards is entirely to do with the marvellous visual effects, and the ever so justified use of 3D presentation. Even in their greatness though, the VFX still seem a bit soundstage-y (apart from the tiger which is a true achievement). Take this accomplishment away, and all you are left with is an emotionless shell of a narrative, thanks mainly to a by-the-books screenplay and an altogether unaffecting lead performance from Suraj Sharma.
The build up to the film’s most impressive second act is tepid, slowly plodding through Pi’s early life. You learn how his full name is Piscine and how he was named after a swimming pool and how all the kids at school poked fun at him because his name sounded a little bit like ‘pissing’. Then, the weird-named, friendless loser all of a sudden becomes a hero after he manages to fill three large blackboards with an endless progression of the mathematical constant, π. Why, though? It seems all too convenient that a boy named after a swimming pool would just so happen to be mathematically gifted in the knowledge of the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, the name of which just so happens to be the same as the abbreviated version of his own. Within the context of the narrative at this early stage, it seems a pointless and exhausting plot point, especially as Pi’s intellectual gifts are in no way referenced at any point later in the film.
This example is just one of many anomalies that masses will struggle with. ‘Masses’ being the enormous amounts of viewers who will find it difficult to simply ‘buy in to the magic’. With certain films (the best example for this scenario being Midnight In Paris), it is effortless. Places and situations seem extraordinary, but within the world of the film’s premeditated narrative structure, it is not at all hard to enjoy, if not necessarily believe. The screenplay being the textbook hash that it is causes Life of Pi to fall short of this mark before it’s even really begun.
The second act couldn’t kick off in a more intense way, but amongst the 3D rain and ultimate peril, you begin to care less and less about a character that has up until this point, not given you a reason to care about him in the first place. Even when his entire family is lost, it’s hard to care. More for the reason that their deaths are in no way dramaticised, but certainly not helped by the fact that in light of this, the film’s emotions are then forced to lie solely in the dramatic talents of Sharma. A real shame.
At this point, all that’s left is the hope that the evolving relationship between a young boy and a tiger will redeem the film on personal and spiritual levels. But even that aspect of the story falls flat and leaves you unconnected. And when Pi needs salvation from above, in his most desperate moments, it’s hard not to cast your mind back to the beginning of the film when Pi inexplicably decided to follow multiple religions…for no reasons that matter to the film at all.
Finally, once off his lifeboat, and having regaled some company men with his story (which they don’t believe), he retells the entire story for something like ten minutes and replaces the animals with human counterparts which leaves everyone teary eyed.
Overhyped and overconfident in its own ‘spirituality’, no amount of late exposition from Rafe Spall can save Life of Pi from being pretentious and amateur storytelling, preying on the heartstrings of its audience, and using its trailers to make you believe it’s going to be something it’s not; a good film.