Reviews A tiger can crowd a lifeboat Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi” is a miraculous
Reviews A tiger can crowd a lifeboat Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi” is a miraculous
Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi” is a miraculous achievement of storytelling and a landmark of visual mastery.
Inspired by a worldwide best-seller that many readers must have assumed was unfilmable,
it is a triumph over its difficulties. It is also a moving spiritual achievement,
a movie whose title could have been shortened to “life.”
The story involves the 227 days that its teenage hero spends drifting across the Pacific in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger.
They find themselves in the same boat after an amusing and colorful prologue,
which in itself could have been enlarged into an exciting family film.
Then it expands into a parable of survival, acceptance and adaptation. I imagine even Yann Martel,
the novel’s French-Canadian author, must be delighted to see how the usual kind of
Hollywood manhandling has been sidestepped by Lee’s poetic idealism.
The story begins in a small family zoo in Pondichery, India, where the boy christened Piscine is raised.
Piscine translates from French to English as “swimming pool,” but in an India where many more speak English than French,
his playmates of course nickname him “pee.” Determined to put an end to this, อ่านต่อ