I watched Life of Pi again as I was screening it for my students and discussing it. I am reminded again that the movie tops my personal list of favourite movies and there hasn’t really been a replacement to it since 2012. Even after more than a decade since its release, Life of Pi still holds the same amount of charm and appeal to me and I am yet to come across a movie that surpasses the level of innocent emotional intelligence it embodies. Suraj Sharma’s portrayal of ‘Pi’ is still one of my most favourite performances so far and I’m still very much in love with the character.
The character building
The entire movie is built upon the foundation of Pi’s emotional intelligence, which is established exceptionally since the beginning of the film. There are notable sources of his EQ, his experiments with faith being the primary one. To Pi, God isn’t a distant entity that grants boons and sanctions punishments over mistakes; but an interactive, close entity that is very involved in his life. Even as he follows three different religions – Hinduism, Christianity and Islam, he is adequately exposed to scepticism and rational thinking through his father. A combination of all the faiths layered with a penchant for rationale crafted him into a young boy capable of surviving 200 days in the sea with a tiger, something that is impossible for anyone without the mental capacity to perceive hope and anchor themselves.
At every turn, we find Pi invoking God or religious references in a varied range. But faith was not the only element of his EQ of course; there were other things like his exposure to extensive reading and a unique opportunity to grow up with easy access to animals in his father’s zoo. There was also a deeply rooted necessity in him to find ‘enchantments’ in life, something that kept him constantly seeking and pursuing unique experiences. Thus when life granted him the most unique experience that anyone could ask for, he was sort of prepared.
The character establishment part of the movie that spans up to the part until the ship sinks is convincing enough that the second part, where Pi is stranded in the Pacific Ocean with a tiger, becomes believable. The question of how a frail looking boy (though a skilled swimmer) could survive 200 odd days at sea with no help could easily be raised otherwise. The question does not rise because the character establishment part has been executed to perfection and we have no difficulty believing that the frail looking boy has the IQ and EQ that justifies his survival through the impossible odds.
The wonderfully mysterious Richard Parker
Richard Parker stands right there with Pi as the central attraction of the movie. The Bengal tiger who won the Oscar for the movie thanks to the perfection of CGI that designed him, is the point of the film that I love discussing just as much as Pi’s character. Richard Parker’s presence in Pi’s life and his enchantment with the tiger’s majesty and ferocity is established early on in the film. When thrust into the sea on a lifeboat with this wild animal, Pi manages to co-exist with him for the next 227 days and even befriend him to an extent.
A massive point of curiosity in the movie is when Pi says that when he finally reached the shores of Mexico and established survival, Richard Parker simply walked off into the forest. He didn’t as much as turn back for a moment and display a flicker of attachment or gratitude to his companion at sea for so long, but simply left ‘unceremoniously’. Why would that be? Is it simply a remnant of Pi’s father’s lesson that Richard Parker is after all an animal and animals don’t have a soul? Perhaps because Richard Parker was after all a cat and cats don’t really grow attached to people?
Or…?
And then there’s another explanation to it. At the end, when the insurance company agents converse with the lone survivor of the ship that sunk 227 days ago in the Pacific Ocean, Pi recites his story as we saw it in the movie at first. However, natural skepticism does not allow the agents to believe the story and they ask him for a more believable ‘truth’ about how he survived so long at sea. And to that, Pi narrates a different story where he replaces the animals with human characters and completely leaves out Richard Parker. The zebra becomes the Buddhist sailor, the hyena becomes the cunning chef and the orangutan becomes his mother – who survive together initially but the other three end up killing each other, leaving him alone.
There is a longstanding theory that this version of the story is actually what happened on the lifeboat. Richard Parker was never there; the tiger was only the project of Pi’s survival instincts, his ‘Id’, personified as the animal that he had always admired as majestic and feared. If you observe the behaviour of the tiger towards Pi, it correlates perfectly with how a person’s survival instincts might motivate him to survive an ordeal like that. It would attack him, keep him alert, give him a purpose, keep him engaged and when its purpose is served, leave him ‘unceremoniously’ because it was never a physical entity.
Arguable as it is, I like this interpretation and how well it actually fits the cinematography. Alongside the many layers to Pi’s personality, Ang Lee (Director) has placed so many Easter eggs throughout the movie that watching it once is never enough. Life of Pi is thoroughly fulfilling for someone looking for a holistic cinematic experience with lingering impact rather than just entertainment. For the reasons stated here and a few more, Life of Pi remains my forever favourite movie that I keep returning to.
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