Life of Pi

I have to say, Life of Pi was better than I expected it to be. I expected to really dislike it, but I actually quite enjoyed it.

I never read the book. It was recommended to me many, many times but I had taken an instant dislike to it. I read how its premise was taken more or less wholesale from a Brazilian novel about a boy stuck on a dingy with a jaguar. I read how it was rather artificially hanging on the Booker-baiting trend of an Indian setting with magical realism elements, especially when everyone has an oh-so-quirky history, like the main boy who is named after a swimming pool. I read how the boy and the tiger end up coexisting and end up on a fictional island of meerkats, and decided it would be trite and awful and try much too hard.

Nor was I enthusiastic about the film, initially linked to the director who has probably fallen furthest from grace of any I can think of beside Michael Bay – M. Night Shyamalan. He was then removed from it, and though directors I like such as Alfonso Cuarón and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and by the time years had dragged on an Ang Lee finally committed, I felt it was in ‘troubled project’ waters and likely wouldn’t come out of it well, especially as Lee is rather uneven, especially with more populist work.

Still, the film was finally made – and the trailer duly arrived, showcasing some rather lovely CG and annoying me with a motif of words matched with drumbeats. If I had missed it, I wouldn’t have been duly worried, but I caught it.

And yes, I should have given it more of a chance. It asked you to believe a lot less than I thought it would and it allowed for an acknowledged cynicism. There are some fanciful moments with the tiger, but you are never expected to believe it is anything but a wild animal. The island is indeed one of the parts that really stretches credulity, but a plot point was made of that. And though the framing device – about a visiting Canadian writer looking for a story – is lazy, but it also provides a much-needed alternate story. And yes, there is enough beauty in the oceans, as well as hallucinogenic fantasies of the oceans, that there’s a real visual spectacle.

It’s still a concept lifted wholesale from elsewhere, even if the devil is in the details here. Speaking of matters spiritual, I was not keen on the treatment of different religions, made into a quirk that comes over very differently when you remember it’s from Yann Martel rather than from a generalised, rather patronising Western idea of superior spirituality in India. It also still gets quite dull at times. But it is still lovely to look at – especially in 3D – tells a fun tall tale, centres on a likeable character with a likeable fierce tiger companion, and well worth the time to watch in the cinema, even if you can’t persuade me it would be worth the hours it takes to read a book.