I am trying to understand why I came out grumpy rather than enthused from Ang Lee’s spectacular CGI movie, The Life of Pi, taken from Yann Martel‘s popular novel, and Man Booker prize winner of ten years ago.

I didn’t completely dislike it, of course. The filmography was wonderful, the special effects superb. I even, sort of, liked the sound track.  And how terrific to see a large budget movie aimed at American and European audiences with non Caucasians in all the lead rolls (that would include one non homo sapiens) and all of them stunning to look at — Suraj Sharma as the teen-age Pi, Irrfan Khan as the adult Pi, and  Tabu as the mother.   The only Caucasian is the evil cook with Gérard Depardieu in a cameo role.

The set up, explaining Pi’s unusual name, his youth, his familiarity with animals and his embracing polytheistic religious curiosity, is sweetly done.  We like him. We like his parents and his brother.  It is a little strange to see these domestic scenes filmed in 3-D, accustomed as we are to 3-D signifying the spectacular, the awesome and other-worldly, but okay, we go along.

The second part, of book and movie, begins with the terrible storm at sea.  I’ve been in a few gun-metal gray seas myself, around the Philippines as it turns out, and you’ll never feel more engulfed in a raging boil until you actually are.  It is here, however, as Pi is catapulted into the only life-boat that is able to be launched, with four animals, that I began to lose interest.  The animal CGI (Suraj Sharma says he was never face to face with a tiger, anywhere, much less in a boat at sea) was fantastic — even gruesomely so as the zebra twitches with a broken leg and fights off the hyena, as the hyena pulls at still living zebra and orangutan flesh.  (Some of the threads on movie sites are filled with outrage against animal cruelty.)  The four animals are quickly reduced to one, that is,  Richard Parker, a Bengal tiger. Pi and RP, in their 227 days at sea, duel each other to mutual acceptance and beyond to a friendship, though quite unlike that between a man and dog. In the end Richard Parker hauls his emaciated frame into a Mexican jungle without so much as a backward glance.

Why do I lose interest? The beginning presents itself as real: real zoo animals, real family, real ship, real storm.  Then we see him slipping and sliding on the drenched decks, clearly the danger of fools, shouting his exuberance, moments later, deep under water he swims through corridors of sloshing water holding his breath for impossible long minutes; we see animals shooting by him in that water.  We are getting unreal. He gets dumped over board, into a life boat — and never, in what seems like hours, puts on a life-jacket, even though they are close at hand. I find myself irritated. You want to survive you put on a PFD (personal flotation device) even in a fantasy.  During what seems like hours of exhausting physical exertion he is able to sleep holding on to the bowsprit of the boat.  A wounded zebra occupies the back of the boat for a while, along with the tiger.  We presume the zebra will be eaten but — from one frame to the next it is simply gone.  No blood remains. No shots of Pi hauling it out.  In another shot the bottom of the boat is littered with flying fish, hundreds of them, next frame they are gone, bottom quite clean, no blood, no remains.  So, this is not real anymore, not to me.

Can’t I just enjoy the fantasy?  It’s hard when reality keeps interrupting: they are thirsty, they are hungry, Pi gets sun sores, Richard Parker is exhausted in real, tigerish, ways.

I did love the photography and whatever film magic was added to make the luminescent sea, the circling sperm whale, the floating clouds up through the water as though no surface was there. Gorgeous.  I mean no insult, however, to say, that most National Geographic films are gorgeous in the same way.  And, the penguins coursing through the icy water to pop up through aqua-green ice holes, are real, are actually filmed, no CGI, in a magic that impresses because it is really, really, real.

And what about the religious question?  The three major religions?  The beginning of book and film make much of this, though less in the film.  Martel is repeatedly asked and repeatedly says, religion is important to him. The novel, reviewed everywhere, is about the search for and final belief in God – of some kind.  The survival for 227 days at sea seals the deal for Pi. [Excuse the curmudgeon in me here: like all those who believe their miraculous survival is explained by God’s intervention, the hard parts are skipped: what about the others?] In the novel he continues to pray every morning while at sea, to relate to his gods; the question, if not a struggle, of belief is threaded through to the end. In the film, not so much.  Pi thanks Vishnu for the arrival of a big fish, but that’s about it as far as I remember.  So when the end comes and the Japanese insurance agents, after complaining about the animal story, are given another ‘reality based’ story, they admit they first story is better.  Pi comments “and so with God,” meaning, I think, that the stories told by humans about God are better than the stories available without him.

Stop right there!

Born upon this earth for no known reason except the intimate chemistry of our parents, we want to know.  What is the story?  Why am I here?  Why is there torture, and famine, planned and unplanned?  Why does innocence mean nothing in the struggle to survive?  Why does that child suffer and die and that one live? Why be good if goodness matters not at all in the eyes of — the one who decides?  And the final answer is…  Chose the better story!? My goodness …

Religion, except in its most esoteric reaches, is not just a story, not just a string of words inventing explanations for the unknown or unknowable.  It is set of beliefs, upon which people act.  They don’t simply enjoy the story, the believe the explanation and in doing so create very particular and different, competing, social realities.  Religion is not, and has never been just a story about tigers, or men called upon to kill their sons or those who go into the wilderness to understand.  It has been, and is still, a set of beliefs which sometimes turns tigers into men, killers into peacemakers, but more often has made tigers out of men and directed them to the prey.

If Pi, the the second, less popular story, killed the cook by means of the tiger within him and manages to ‘forget’ it through a fable we have a pretty good idea today of what that is, and what is likely to happen next.  It’s called PTSD and horrific acts however deeply buried or turned into a tall tale, are likely to re-erupt; the tiger will return.

Nor is the problem of fables being selected over reality simply a problem with religion.  Witness the fables told and believed by many, and many in power, that black helicopters from the UN are being readied to take over the U.S., or that the extreme weather around the world has nothing to do with what all the science is telling us, too much CO2 blocking too much earth-heat from returning to space.  Belief in the fabulous over the real is always a dangerous belief.

The third part of the film lets us down.  He has been picked up and is being interrogated by the Japanese insurance agents who are trying to understand why the ship went down.  After 90 minutes or so of glorious 3-D story telling, the competing story is tossed off in a few minutes with the camera staring relentlessly at Pi’s face.  Violence and cannibalism told without an image.  I remembered the impact Charles Olson’s 1947 Call Me Ishmael made on me, with a description of the months at sea and cannibalism by some of the crew of the Essex — which event became the kernel of Melville’s Moby Dick. Opportunity missed, I thought as Pi laconically offered the all-human story in place of the man-and-tiger story.

If the point is that invented stories are better than real ones, the punches were certainly pulled.  Give me a Shackleton story in all its reality over Shackleton being saved by an imagined narwhal any day. At least, if there is meant to be a real question between invention and reality then let it be a fair fight.  Perhaps Capsized, or Adrift, stories of real people adrift at sea  who come back to recount it in plain human terms would be more to my liking.

A problem always between 36 hour books and 2 1/2 hour movies is that a lot goes missing.  And so it does.  The detailed religious faith theme of the book is pretty well gone, reduced to the interesting choices of Pi’s youth, and an enigmatic sentence at the end.  [If there was religious significance in the sweet/poison flipping of the island with the sun, and the tooth inside the flower, it was lost on me.] The insertion of the writer [Rafe Spall], clearly a stand-in for Martel, is much more important in the novel, helping the reader see the story as coming from a sometimes dubious narrator. He is frankly, a distraction in the movie.  The young man, at loose ends and looking up Pi at the suggestion of an uncle in India is not what you’d call a probing, thoughtful potential author.  He seems, and looks asleep. We learn nothing of Pi as the teller of the story which he hopes to write, no details are added or corrected because of his questions.

I always wonder, after seeing a movie, or reading a book, what was so important to the auteur to spend so much time and money on? What did she or he want to say, or do?  There are plenty of efforts to which the answer is simply, ‘to entertain,’ to block out other parts of the world and put the mind behind the eyes in a groove-mood; no big questions.  If there are little dilemmas they are worked out as part of the human condition.  Others however, ask bigger questions.  Martel seems to have wanted to grapple with that: faith in a dangerous world.   Ang Lee?  Not so much I think.  What then?  Spectacle?  Innovation? (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was an eye-opener of choreography, athleticism, camera work and special effects, wrapped around a standard love and martial arts story.) Broke Back Mountain, also Lee’s, did explore vital personal and moral issues — it must be said, with nothing more complicated that a horse.  Life of Pi for Ang?  He bowed to the spectacular.  The rest slipped away.

I think of the Ang Lee creation as one of those pieces of art which have taken old farm implements, or guns, and turned them into something else completely.  The origins are discernible but now different tools and a different purpose is at work. To my taste, since major resemblances to the novel were dropped, Lee might have gone even further.  Why not just leave it with the tiger and the whales and the starry nights and luminescent seas?  Leave the big questions Martel is interested in to another day, or a smaller film?

It didn’t make me believe, as promised, in God.  It didn’t even make me very interested. It did make me think that 3-D is another jaw-dropping movie technology, like the special effects of train wrecks and falling 300 feet to survive and fight another day, that gobbles up the story itself. If it is, as Ang Lee says, still in its infancy we should hope it matures and eventually, like sound, and color, lifts good stories to fine heights instead of swamping the boat like a storm over the Pacific.

Some more reviews at Slate, and a bunch at Rotten Tomatoes (88%), Metacritic (78)