The preferred story

Among the major films released this year, there may be none more overtly religious than Life of Pi, directed by Ang Lee and based on Yann Martel’s best-selling book, which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2002.

The book and the film, which is remarkably faithful to the book, are about storytelling and about belief. In both the book and film, the adult Pi (Irrfan Khan) tells his story to a skeptical Canadian novelist (Rafe Spall). He recounts growing up in India, where his father owned a small zoo.

We learn how Pi gets his name and follow his religious pursuits as he adopts his mother’s Hinduism, then Catholicism, then Islam. His atheistic father emphasizes the importance of science and reasoning, and Pi adopts that as well. For him, the world is a vast body to be explored with curiosity and love.

Then economic troubles arrive, and Pi’s father must sell the zoo. He books his family and the animals on a cargo ship bound for Canada. A storm sinks the ship, and the teenage Pi (Suraj Sharma) alone survives among the humans. He finds refuge on a 26-foot-long lifeboat and is soon joined by a wounded Zebra, a vicious hyena, an orangutan and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. In a short time, only Pi and the tiger remain.

Their journey together make up the greater part of the narrative, and one of the amazing accomplishments of Martel’s novel is to maintain the reader’s keen interest over such a limited scope. The miracle of the story is that the boy survives his journey across the Pacific with a Bengal tiger. The miracle of the storytelling is that the author pulls this off.

The film does, too, though not as well. There are points where it felt long, and I wanted relief from the tension. But while the book focuses on Pi’s ponderings about life and faith, Lee uses some astounding images to beguile us. At times the water’s surface is like a mirror that reflects the sky so that Pi seems to be both underwater and above the clouds. He also shows Pi’s hallucinations as he struggles with thirst, hunger and fear.

Perhaps the film’s crowning achievement is the digital magic it uses to show a tiger on a boat with a boy. It looks so real, down to the smallest detail. We even see the tiger grow thinner as the food disappears. If this film isn’t nominated for an Oscar for best special effects, something is wrong.

The novelist has come to Pi because he was told that Pi would tell him a story that would make him believe in God—a tall order that sounds anathema to skeptics.

After Pi reaches land and is recovering in a Mexican hospital, two representatives of the Korean company that owned the ship ask him why the ship sank. Pi doesn’t know but tells his story. The two men say that no one will believe that story. So Pi makes up another story that replaces the animals with people from the ship and describes how he alone came to be left.

He tells the men they can choose which story they want to use. The novelist asks him, Which story is true? Pi says, Which story do you prefer?

Life of Pi is a fable about storytelling and belief. We choose the stories we want to believe. Our faith in God is not based on fact but on belief, just as not having faith in God is based on belief, on believing a different story.

I imagine theists and non-theists will enjoy this film for different reasons. Both will enjoy the riveting story of survival and the humor that runs throughout. But non-theists may not like the lesson inherent in the story.

Either way, it’s a well-made film.