A Life in Two Hours?

I have something of a history with Yann Martel's Life of Pi, largely because I have something of a habit of rereading everything I love multiple times, often with years between each read.

Life of Pi divides Pi's life into three segments: Part One (Pondicherry and Toronto), Part Two (The Pacific Ocean), and Part Three (Benito Juárez Infirmary, Tomatlán, Mexico). While during my second reading (more accurately Reading 1.5) I skipped the "boring" Part One (I was in elementary school and I refuse to be held accountable to literary shallowness), it now is as precious to me as the violent and peculiar animal life in the second part and Pi's cheerful enthusiasm contrasting with the other men's irritable disbelief in the third. 

Part One is the story of Piscine Molitor Patel, son of a zookeeper, who was named after a swimming pool in Paris and is mortified by the way his classmates and teachers slur his name in the Indian heat; who renames himself with the help of mathematics and a chalkboard (My name is Piscine Molitor Patel, known to all as Pi Patel. Π = 3.14); who finds not one religion, but three, and clings to each for different reasons; whose mentors are his priest, his pandit, his imam, and his atheistic biology teacher; who loves the certainty of science and the wonder of religion both; whose family must move to Canada to escape when “the New India split to pieces and collapsed in Father’s mind.” Pi is philosophical, intelligent, and still bursting with the innocence of youth. His thoughtful narration flows between young Pi’s immediate, childishly wise thoughts and the nostalgic reflections of his older self as he relates his story to the writer. He is at once young and old, naïve and experienced, but never foolish or cynical.

Part Two begins with the simplest of sentences: “The ship sank.” Those words mean the loss of his family: his brother, Ravi, who had teased him endlessly about his three religions; his mother, Gita, who defended herself from her son’s questions by suggesting books for him to read instead; and his father, Santosh, who called his wife “my bird,” and who showed his sons how dangerous animals could be by taking them to each cage and telling them how its occupants could maim or kill a person. They mean the escape of the animals, the cages somehow unlocked. They mean a tiger named Richard Parker, an orangutan called Orange Juice, a zebra with a broken leg, a hyena, and a boy called Pi, all together in a lifeboat “three and a half feet deep, eight feet wide and twenty-six feet long, exactly.” They mean the transformation of a boy who hated to snap the stem on a banana because it sounded too much like the snapping of a neck to one who will gladly drink fresh turtle blood. They mean an impossible island, an impossible encounter, and an impossible rescue.

Part Three is a tape recording. Two men from the Japanese Ministry of Transport have been tasked with discovering the reason the ship sank. Instead, they get two stories: one fantastic and one gruesome. They are lectured on philosophy and discovery and the wonder of the world, because even after his ordeals, Pi remains a staunch and cheerful dreamer. In the end, Mr. Okamoto and Mr. Chiba choose a story to believe, but the reader is free to make another decision.

The book, the author, and Pi himself ask us: Do you believe the first, unbelievable, impossible story? Do you take a leap of faith and trust that the fantastic can be real?

Or is that just a soft, placating lie? Is the second, darker, more brutal tale the true one?

Which do you believe?

Because this is such a powerful novel, and because at last we have the technology to create a reasonably realistic CGI tiger, of course someone was going to make it a movie.

The trailer, for your viewing pleasure:

To be clear, I have not seen the movie. It has earned some fantastic reviews, as well as some less fantastic ones, which I have not read because I want to judge it myself when I do see it. I am hoping for the best--hoping that my fears will be proven groundless.

And I do have fears.

My biggest fear is that they will take a story with cinematic and visual elements that complement and enhance the emotional, spiritual, and physical journey, and they will make a cinematic and visual movie with emotional and spiritual elements. This theory is only aided by the glowing CGI whale. 

My second biggest fear is that they will take a story with zero romantic interests—unless you count the wife we only meet once the couple has married—and throw in a romantic story arc. This theory is aided by the presence of a young woman with whom young Pi—not forty-something-year-old Pi—seems very friendly. I do not know who she is or her role in the story because she is not present in the original novel.

Perhaps the visual scenes and potential romance will enhance the message of the original work since they cannot use every detail. Perhaps they add another dimension to Pi's tale. Perhaps. 

I am not strictly opposed to filmmakers adding scenes as long as they connect the missing pieces that the film cannot possibly include in a reasonable amount of time. I only worry that some of the most important elements in Pi's life--things that shape who he is and who he becomes--will be lost in favor of making something look nice or adding the romance that every move in the world absolutely must include. 

I will watch the movie with an open mind and an open heart, and I hope that it is as beautiful as the book I know and love.