“He said you had a story that would make me believe in God.”  This is both the essence and the greatest fault of Life of Pi.  It tells the beautiful and exciting story of the young Indian man, Pi, and his adventure adrift on a lifeboat with an orangutan, a hyena, a zebra and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.  It’s a gorgeous film, with amazing effects, and based on a book that most people thought to be unfilmable.  It has some impressive acting, is filled with many interesting and stimulating ideas and is in many ways a remarkable achievement, but throughout the movie that quote kept ringing through my head.

Life of Pi, based on the bestselling book by Yann Martel (which I have not read), and is masterfully directed by Ang Lee.  It tells the story of Pi, from his days as a young boy in India to the present as a grown man living in Canada.  As a child, his family owned a zoo, and he is taught to respect the sanctity and power of the animals.  Pi is raised as a Hindu (and a vegetarian), but we see him gain an appreciation for both Christianity and Islam, much to the frustration of his atheist father.  He says that “faith is a house with many rooms” including room for doubt.

One day, when Pi is 16, his father informs the family that they will be moving to Canada and to sell all of the animals there, as their value is greater in North America.  They board a freighter and one night there is a terrible storm.  The freighter sinks with the loss of all hands, including Pi’s family, and he finds himself stranded on a lifeboat with a handful of animals.  The situation quickly deteriorates further, as the tiger Richard Parker kills and eats the other animals and drives Pi from the boat onto a makeshift raft.

For the next 227 he survives, alone with Richard Parker, and the young man and the tiger learn to coexist.  They endure storms, whales, sharks, flying fish, thirst and heat, and a large carnivorous island together.  Pi comes to realize that the tiger is keeping him alive, both by its companionship and the threat of being eaten.  It’s a miraculous story, that’s both riveting and occasionally humorous, and Suraj Sharma, who plays Pi at age 16, is especially captivating when you consider that most of his performance was opposite a green screen and non-existent animals.

That Pi survives is not a spoiler, because his adventure is told as a flashback, nor his the story of his survival necessarily the point of the movie.  The movie opens with an aspiring writer coming to visit an adult Pi at his home, upon the recommendation that opened this review.  The writer is seeking answers and the story of the shipwreck is what he receives.  I won’t give away the “twist” (using that term loosely) ending, but Pi’s story and the question of faith go hand in hand.

Personally, I find the statement and the implications of the ending to be somewhat pretentious.  Life of Pi proposes that we all choose to believe in what appeals to us the most, that in the end no one choice is better than any other and what’s important is that it means something to us.  While I agree with the surface of that statement, I feel that the more important question is not why we believe what we believe, but why do we choose to believe at all.  Pi’s story isn’t one to make you believe in God if you’re not otherwise inclined to do so, but rather one that will help you understand why you already believe in the God you choose to.  Pi’s story is a metaphor for faith, but I feel like it’s a flawed, if beautiful, one.

The story also feels like it would work better on the page than on the screen.  Ang Lee and the filmmakers do an amazing job of putting stunning images on the screen, in an immersive use of 3D as well, but the images never feel real.  Everything feels too choreographed and not organic enough.  It feels visually impressive but often hollow.  Sharma’s performance as Pi is excellent, but he can only do so much on his own.  Life of Pi is a technical masterpiece, but does not pack the emotional impact it set out to (except, perhaps, for animal lovers).  It’s an enjoyable film, and worth seeing if you can still find it showing in 3D, but I never felt like it lived up to what it was claiming to be.  Its ideas are interesting, and it makes me curious to read the book, but the film isn’t one that will stick with me the way the story claims.  Perhaps a better way to describe it would be “a story to make me think about God,” and I don’t think that’s exactly what they were going for.

B+