Film review by John Campbell
After peaking (pardon the pun) with Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee blotted his copybook with his most recent outing, the regrettable Taking Woodstock (2009). He has, however, made a triumphant return to form with this lyrical visualisation of Yann Martel’s Booker prize-winning novel.
Stripped bare, it’s a nautical/spiritual road trip in which we cross the Pacific in a lifeboat with Pi Patel and Richard Parker, a fully grown Bengal tiger.
In transferring what was a richly esoteric fable to the screen, Lee’s success can ironically be attributed to the orthodoxy of his approach. He bookends the narrative, told in flashback, with the older Pi (Irrfan Khan) explaining to a biographer (Rafe Spall) the origin of his curious name and how, as a teenager, his father decided to move the family and his privately owned zoo animals from Pondicherry to Canada. All but Pi and four other creatures perished in a storm at sea. From this point, as is standard procedure, the cuts to Pi and his interviewer are omitted until the concluding, present-day scenes of summary and reflection.
In between is the journey, in which Lee wisely lets his camera do the work. The sights are wondrous, whether in 2D or 3D – at one point the audience gasped at the ocean’s glowing phosphorescence. The younger Pi (Suraj Sharma), distressed and near overwhelmed by his plight, eventually understands that his twenty-six-foot vessel is a microcosm of life and all its struggles (including a heavy dose of anthropomorphism, with the hyena copping a bad rap as villain).
Because the most profound stories are usually the simplest, the second half of the film is inclined to repetition, but when we are dealing with such spectacularly beautiful and convincing imagery it hardly matters. At the beginning of his conversation with the writer, Pi said that his tale would convince him of the existence of God; I’m not sure that it did that for me, but it certainly put me in awe of the power and the glory of computer-generated imagery. Sublime.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
