Tuesday Book Matinee: Life of Pi

Warning: This review contains spoilers.

I've been thinking about Life of Pi all week, days before going to see the new Ang Lee directed movie based on Yann Martel's novel of the same name.

What I've been wondering about is just where is God in the story.  Yann Martel's novel is one of the few great novels, already I'm betraying my own personal bias, to openly deal with questions of faith.  Before going to the movie this past Saturday, I began to wonder if maybe Richard Parker, the tiger, can be read as God.  He's not a comforting God at all, but Old Testament gods tend towards the demanding.  They are angry gods who must be pacified regularly or they will unleash their wrath on a humanity incapable of fighting them.  Pi, a lone boy, represents humanity; the lifeboat he is trapped in the middle of the ocean is the world floating in the universe; Richard Parker, the adult male Bengal tiger who shares the lifeboat is God.  Pi must make offerings of food to Richard Parker to keep him happy. This is not a comforting notion at all, but I'm talking about the God in the book of Job.   He is not really a comforting god.  I think it's possible to read Life of Pi as a take on the book of Job, as a story of how Pi's faith was tested.

Much to his credit, Ang Lee does not shy away from questions of faith in his movie adaptation.  Life of Pi is about many things other than faith, so Mr. Lee could have made a much different, much safer movie.  Had he done so, he probably would have ended up with something close to the awful adaptation of The Golden Compass which ignored all the questions of faith and religion that were central to the novel.  The resulting movie was safe, but boring and ultimately pointless.  The intended sequels were never made.

Although he makes some changes to the novel, Mr. Lee explores the novel's twin themes of the nature of faith and the nature of stories without shying away from anything that might prove controversial.  While Mr. Lee favors the second section of the book,  the novel's opening chapters, when the young Pi explores multiple religions deciding to become a Christian and a Muslim while remaining a Hindu, are in the movie enough to make the story's final point about religion and God.  Mr. Lee even allows Pi a Job like moment when he demands to know what more God can possibly want of him after all he has already taken away.

In fact, because he deals so openly with questions of religion,  Mr. Lee's movie finally made it possible for me to see the point of the carnivorous island of the meerkats.  In the closing section of the book, Pi and Richard Parker find themselves on a strange island full of meercats.  Each night the meerkats retreat to the trees because everything on the island's ground and in its pools of fresh water is eaten by the island itself.  This made no sense to me at all when I read and when I re-read the book, at least from a Judeo-Christian perspective.  (Mr. Lee has already referenced Jonah by showing a giant whale leaping over the lifeboat.)  But the island of the meerkats had always struck me as  bizarre and inexplicable. However, in the movie Mr. Lee shows Pi sleeping in a tree and then moves his camera out from the island to take in a view of the sky full of stars and pulls the camera back farther into the universe until the stars become the form of the sleeping Vishnu.  I thought, of course.  How could I have missed this?  A carnivorous island full of meekats makes no sense from a Judeo-Christian or Muslim context. The God of Abraham rescues his prophets when they need rescuing but not like this.  Vishnu, however, who once sent Hanuman a monkey king capable of lifting a mountain, would send along an island full of meerkats when needed.

If Pi  is making this story up, he knows the allegories he is playing with.

So is Pi making up the story? What really happened on the lifeboat.

Mr. Lee presents a framing story to make it possible for him to naturally include both versions of the story and to give Pi the happy ending we all hoped he would have.  In the film, an adult Pi is telling his story to a young writer who is looking for something to write about.  He tells the story of his life before the shipwreck, the story of his time with the tiger Richard Parker, and then a final story, one without a tiger.

And I saw my mistake.  I had forgotten about the hyena.  If the zebra is the happy Buddhist, and the orangutan is Pi's mother, then the hyena is the cook which makes Pi the tiger.  Once again, if Pi is the tiger, where is God?  If there is a tiger, then I can read it as standing for an old testament God, one we should rightly fear.  If Pi is the tiger, then the tiger stands for the part of him that is dark enough to commit the terrible acts necessary for survival, but maybe this is the part of Pi that is God.  If, in the end, we are left to select which version of the story we like, we must admit that we are creating the version of God we believe to be the true one.   Can God then be something within our own nature?  Richard Parker is still a terrible force, whether he is a tiger or a human, something that must be pacified in either case and I think we can take comfort in the idea that he only comes when needed and walks away afterwards.

But enough of this-- you want to know if I liked the movie.  It certainly left me with food for thought, even after feasting on the novel twice.  I expect C.J. and I will be talking about for several more days.  We both loved it, but I was the only one to cry.  There's a point in the movie when anyone who has read the book will know that the tiger story is about to be called into question. When that moment came, I wanted to scream "No! Don't say it!  Leave the tiger story alone! Don't tell us what really happened!"  A lesser film-maker might have done so.  The makers of The Golden Compass ended their movie several chapters before the tragic death that concluded the book.

Mr. Lee keeps the book intact, but adds a little coda to give Pi the same happy ending Job had.

So which was better?

The movie is wonderful.  See it in 3-D if you have the chance.  Mr. Lee uses the technology to add to his story, not simply to provide shocking thrills for the viewer.  There is a moment when Pi is hiding under the tarp of the lifeboat looking towards Richard Parker.  In 3-D we are inside the cramped space along with him, worried about what the tiger in front of us will do.  Mr. Lee uses the 3-D effect to add layers of action fore-ground/back-ground to several scenes. The image of Pi floating on the water viewed from above transitions to one of Pi floating in the universe viewed from below in a way that is visually stunning while evoking the question of man's position in the universe.

And the tiger is amazing.  Even before this movie I believed we should suspect everything we see on film; after seeing Life of Pi, I believe we should never ever accept a photograph as proof of anything real ever again.  Richard Parker looks like a completely real tiger-- there is never a moment when I felt he was a cartoon.  Mr. Lee has taken a book that many people thought could never become a movie and made a film that is what readers saw in their heads as they read along.

But is the movie a better movie than the book is a book?  For me the answer is no.  It's a great movie, but it did not make me believe in God.  The book made me believe in God, the way a really good sermon can keep you Christian 'til Tuesday as John Steinbeck once said.  The movie made me believe in movies, which is no small feat these days.

Read the book. See the movie.