Shipwrecked en route to Canada from India, Pi Patel (Suraj Sharma) finds himself in a lifeboat with a small menagerie of animals, including a Bengal tiger. As his older self (Irrfan Khan) recounts the story to a writer (Rafe Spall), we travel back in time to his childhood in India and disastrous voyage in which Pi battles the tiger and himself. Ang Lee creates a magical adaptation of Yann Martel’s novel, turning the magical into the real, with high quality CGI that enhances, rather than detracts from, the experience. With iridescent scenes of the ocean at night and the glaring sun by day, Lee’s aesthetic is the perfect combination of reality and dream. Least interesting are the present-day scenes, but these are short and purposeful enough so as not to distract from the effectiveness of the story.
This article appears in Nov 22-28, 2012.