I saw the Life Of Pi today. Just a few quick thoughts…
1. It was good. I have never read the book, and usually avoid even transcendentally good and well hyped books if reviewers promise that they’ll make me believe in God. It’s not that I’m worried about being brainwashed or that I can’t see the quality in the writing or story even if I don’t buy into the message or belief system, but it’s usually that I have eviler, and usually more stupider things to read. Ha ha!
2. I can gather, in a similar vein, that the film is very close in its adaptation of the novel, but leaves the novel’s ending less ambiguous. No spoilers here, not til the last thought.
3. The film is really quite good, and I say that having had no expectations of it going into it. I mostly went into this film, curious to see what was going on since you’re already hearing a lot of potential Oscar buzz to it. The Oscar buzz isn’t off the mark.
4. This definitely will be (or at least should be) a Best Picture nominee. I wouldn’t be upset if it was a Best Picture winner, either. Also, best cinematography, which is possibly a no brainer since so many of the visuals are just gorgeous. I want to see Lincoln nominated for Best Picture, but I think that Life Of Pi is certainly a better film, which is saying a lot. Also, Irrfan Khan deserves a Best Supporting Male Actor nomination, and possibly a win.
5. As for the ending, and here there possibly will be SPOILERS: I took something slightly different away from this movie – which is one that you’ll walk away from needing to do some thinking on – than others, I believe. When the narrator of the tale, the older Pi, gives the Writer a choice between which of the two stories he prefers: the one that is mostly like the real story, the grim tale of human beings under extreme duress, or the tale full of magical realism and refugee animals sailing across the ocean, the Writer of course chooses the story of the boy and the tiger. That is, of course, the story that anyone would choose or prefer. The inference there seems to be that therein lies God’s existence. We create God. We bring our lives to him, the details, and we weave a powerful watcher of our existence, and find the meaning there, in the fiction, not so much in the way our lives were lived, but in the way our lives are retold.
