Warning: Spoiler alert
bobover3 (imported) wrote: Sun Nov 25, 2012 4:29 pm
Saw the movie. Strikingly beautiful, visually. Some of the prettiest photography I've seen in a film.
Never having read the book, I wasn't quite sure about the meaning of the film. You can find a way to face your fears and survive? The necessity of companionship? The ultimate unity of all life? There is a Supreme Spirit which binds us all? Something else? I really don't know. In any case, I was left with the impression of something vaguely hippy and trippy from the 1960s, even though the book appeared in 2001...
A film of accomplished artistry by Ang Lee, as well made as anything he's ever done, but a less than satisfactory experience for me.
Having read the book and knowing the backstory, I can appreciate the movie as an adjunct, an artist's (Ang Lee's) interpretation of the book. With that in mind, I enjoyed it, but I agree that, unlike the book, it did drag at the end. By the time it ended, I was ready for the credits.
I came to love the kid in the book, mostly from the time he was in India. He was open to everything.
His mother was Hindu; his father secular; but he embraced his mother's religion until he was exposed to the catholic religion, whereupon he became a Catholic and a Hindu. He saw good in both of them and didn't understand why he should choose one over the other. Later on, he embraced Islam, and was a Muslim, a Catholic, and a Hindu. Again, although it drove his father and the head of each of those religions in his town crazy, he didn't see a reason to choose. He embraced them all equally. God was God, it didn't matter what one called him or how one worshiped him. He saw good in each religion. Although I don't believe in a personal god, wouldn't it be better if all the Hindus, Muslims, and Christians felt that way? Wouldn't the world be better off for it?
I arrived at this conclusion before reading the following quote, which I just read:
When pleaded with by his parents to choose just one religion, his answer was that Bapu Ghandi said, "All religions are true." Pi said that he just wanted to love God. Each of the religions had individuals that shooed away or otherwise encouraged him to leave the mosque, the church, or the darshan. Pi simply found a way to avoid such people and continue to go to all three. He seemed able always to take life as he found it and make the best of it. Like when it came time for him and his family to leave India for Canada on a ship with many of the animals from the zoo that his father sold to zoos in North America.
We see only glimpses of this in the movie, and what we see makes Pi look kooky and quaint. It does not convey the feeling of the book. It the book, he's a kid that's open to everything, nature, God, whatever.
I can't tell you what the author intended. I don't generally look for meaning in a book or a movies. I think, perhaps, he's trying to say that God works in mysterious ways, and in this case, worked through Richard Parker, the tiger to save him. Without this tiger on the lifeboat with him, he would have died. This tiger that tried to kill him at first, was never his friend, but without him, he would have given up and died. First it was his struggle to tame Richard Parker that preventing him from giving up, and later it was his efforts to save Richard Parker that kept him alive. God was working through Richard Parker.
The moment Pi decided to train Richard Parker was when he realized he needed the tiger — it kept him from despair and therefore alive — besides they were in the same boat, were they not? Pi had to tame the tiger or they would both die. To be alone he saw as a more formidable foe than the tiger.
Again, I'm reading these quotes after I wrote what I did, so I guess I wasn't far off.
http://www.doyletics.com/arj/lifeofpi.htm
Now, I have trouble with that, because if God was working so hard to save him, why did he sink the ship, kill everyone on board, including his family, and strand him on the lifeboat in the first place, but I can gather that might be what the author was trying to say: God can even work through a bloodthirsty tiger. I think the tiger killing the goat was meant to show how wild the tiger actually was.
I agree somewhat about the meerkat island, except it was another opportunity to show that without Richard Parker, Pi would have died. He slept in the tree so Richard Parker wouldn't eat him. In the lifeboat, he was safe from Richard Parker because he had established his territory separate from Richard Parker's and trained the tiger not to enter it. Richard Parker jumped from the lifeboat onto the island first, so if anything he had marked it as his territory. Pi didn't have a territory staked out on the island, so to be safe, he slept in the tree, which saved his life. Otherwise, the island, apparently made up of a mass of floating carnivorous plants, would have eaten him that first night. The plants only fed at night. I agree this was over-the-top, made no sense, and distracted from the story. My reaction when reading it in the book was pretty well the same as bob's.
That Pi would find a human tooth in the one and only fruit he peeled open was incredulous. It clued him that the plants were carnivorous, but even if the plants had at one time eaten a person, what was the chance that the only fruit Pi peeled open would contain a tooth from that person? For me, this was a weak part of book as much as with the movie. I think the author, could have - should have - left it out.
Having read the book first makes it difficult to judge the movie. I will say I was thinking after I saw it, I wish I'd gone to see Red Dawn instead - for what that's worth.