The four-hundred-and-fifty-pound Bengal tiger that appears in Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi” is, of course, a digital beast. You cannot train a tiger to act, although the great Stella Adler did a good job with Marlon Brando. In “Pi,” the re-created cat is fast, beautiful, and hungry. Fearful symmetry, indeed. He’s palpable enough—snarling and frightening, except when he’s half-dying of thirst. The centerpiece of Lee’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s prize-winning 2001 novel is a long confrontation, on a lifeboat, between the tiger and a teen-age Indian boy named Pi (Suraj Sharma), which turns into a wary cohabitation. The story is improbable (we’re meant to see it as a fable even as we watch it), but Lee has filmed it with so much moment-by-moment physical detail and so bounteous a celebration of the natural world that “Life of Pi” becomes one of the great adventure films. You can’t fight the kind of overwhelming sensuous feast that is possible only in the cinema; you just let it sweep you away, as the yawning chasms and purple-and-green forests of “Avatar” did.
It takes a while, however, for “Life of Pi” to reach that level of enchantment. Lee is a generous, intelligent, and patient director, and he has made some wonderful movies, including “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “Brokeback Mountain.” But I wondered, during the longueurs of his previous two films—“Lust, Caution” and “Taking Woodstock”—if his narrative sense wasn’t failing. “Taking Woodstock” just felt slight, but the red-and-ebony Shanghai spy movie “Lust, Caution” was a lamentable case: a great idea, but filled with pointless elaboration and unnecessary sequences. In “Pi,” Lee is, if anything, too patient, too faithful to his source. He holds to Martel’s metafictional frame. In Montreal, a young, uninspired novelist (Rafe Spall) begins a conversation with the now middle-aged Pi (Irrfan Khan), an émigré who teaches religion and says that he once had an astounding adventure. The professor talks, the novelist listens, and the movie slowly gets going. We see Pi’s boyhood in the city of Pondicherry, on the Bay of Bengal, which was formerly a French colony. Pi was a bold youth and an experimenter, who was almost promiscuous in his religious appetites—he was born a Hindu, but took up Christianity and then Islam. His tough father—the essence of this-world realism—disapproved of his son’s curiosity. His mother fed his imagination, his love of stories and beauty. This part of the movie is sweet-tempered but overly methodical, even ponderous, a product of Lee’s determination to pay utmost respect to a culture different from the ones he knows in Taiwan and America. (Lee wants to honor Martel’s tone, as well as his narrative strategy, but perhaps filmmakers should stop using India as a source of higher spirituality—it’s a genteel form of exploitation and one that’s increasingly misleading. Where is the surging, high-tech, entrepreneurial nation of the past twenty years?)
Pi’s family owns a zoo, and decides to move with some of the animals to Canada, and at last the movie proper arrives. On the journey across the Pacific, the old Japanese freighter carrying them is wrecked in a storm. The animals, washed out of the hold, flail around in the tumultuous seas. Pi falls into a lifeboat, where he is joined by a wounded zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, and, popping out from beneath a canvas covering, a tiger, who, owing to a clerical error, is called Richard Parker.
“Welcome to Pi’s Ark!” the boy exclaims, but the group is less a peaceable kingdom sailing toward rebirth than a bunch of irregulars locked in a remorseless struggle for survival. Soon enough, Pi and Richard Parker are the only passengers left on board. As the animal sleeps, Pi makes a small raft, which he attaches to the boat by a rope. He sometimes camps out on the raft, which is dangerous, but less dangerous than a tiger’s jaws. The movie becomes a survivalist mini-epic, in the spirit of “Robinson Crusoe.” Desperate ingenuity and sheer reflex lead to one memorable scene after another, such as when a stowaway rat crawls into Pi’s hair, and he flings it at Richard Parker, who catches it with his teeth and swallows it in one gulp. This central part of the movie is perfectly paced; Lee alternates periods of sleep and calculation with frantic activity, including another big storm and Pi’s improvised attempts to stave off Richard Parker with whatever he has at hand—a spar, a knife, a nervous spray of urine to mark his turf. Throughout, the ocean scenes have a glowing, magical look. We accept that Lee has gone past strict realism, that he’s heightened the beauty and the strangeness of the South Pacific. The boat is bombarded by hundreds of flying fish and surrounded by bioluminescent creatures that undulate in the water at night like candles in a procession.
Suraj Sharma—a Delhi schoolboy who has never acted before—has a handsome face, large, expressive eyes, and an easy way with the camera; he’s intensely sympathetic. He decides that he must learn to live with Richard Parker, so he trains the beast with lumps of fish and a whistle that he finds in the boat. By keeping the tiger alive, he will concentrate enough to keep himself alive. The movie’s great triumph is that Lee and his technicians never anthropomorphize the animal. This is no sentimental boy-meets-big-cat story. Richard Parker is a member of a different species; he’s not interested in affectionate ties with a skinny teen-ager who has kept him from dying. That’s a genuine and bracing insight. But I could have done without the boy’s search for God and other mighty significances. Secularist audiences in general have trouble with “quest” movies and literature (Hermann Hesse, Paulo Coelho), in which a single meaning is somehow to be sought and wrested from the teeming universe. There are many searches, many meanings, most of them partial. As Wallace Shawn said thirty years ago, in “My Dinner with André,” something no more miraculous than a cup of coffee is enough transcendence for one day. “Life of Pi,” at its best, celebrates the idiosyncratic wonders and dangers of raw, ravaging nature, and Lee wrings more than enough meaning from the excitement of that spectacle; we need nothing higher.
David O. Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook” is pretty much a miscalculation from beginning to end. Russell’s hero is a young history teacher, Pat (Bradley Cooper), who is released from a Baltimore hospital after eight months of treatment for bipolar disorder. At home with his parents, in Philadelphia, he talks non-stop about his wife, who has left him. In the middle of the night, he breaks a window by throwing a copy of “A Farewell to Arms” through it, then wakes up Mom and Dad to complain about the book’s plot. I’m not quarrelling with his literary judgment (he might have disposed of “The Old Man and the Sea,” too), but the trouble is that Pat isn’t much more than a manic, self-absorbed chatterbox. What’s supposed to be clinically wrong with him as a man is inseparable from what is merely infantile in him as a character. We’re not much interested in Pat—he doesn’t have an idea in his head, just a lot of words—and Bradley Cooper goes at the part with burning eyes and great speeding rants. Russell doubles down on the noise by making Pat, Sr. (Robert De Niro), an obsessive, too. He’s a furiously superstitious sports nut, who makes wild bets on games and is always in a foul temper. As Pat’s mother (Jacki Weaver) tries to keep the peace, every family scene turns into a fight. Russell made a good satirical comedy—“Flirting with Disaster” (1996)—in which the babble of self-conscious people was buoyantly funny. But “Playbook” just feels worked up—an exercise in which actors can blow off steam. The crowded family living room resembles a coop with outraged chickens pecking for an advantage.
Russell adds to Pat’s complications with Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a young widow from the neighborhood. Tiffany is demanding, needy, and abrupt, but also smart, and she throws Pat off his monomaniacal rhythm. She chases after him, hugs him, then hauls off and smacks him across the face. Tiffany may be a little strange, though we don’t believe her for a second when she says that, in her grief, she “had sex with everyone in my office.” Lawrence is tough and proud, and always plays strong, and the remark doesn’t track with anything we see onscreen. “Playbook” turns into a stuttering romantic comedy of sorts. Pat keeps talking in his head to his wife (who is barely in the movie), and we irritably wait for him to notice that the woman who’s attracted to him, with her smoky voice, sapling body, and fierce directness, is worth the trouble to any man, sane or otherwise. ♦
