Three Point One Four

Even though the current official status is "delayed", it seems a much anticipated film adaptation of the novel Life of Pi is scheduled for 2009. This unusual story of a Hindu-Christian-Muslim castaway marooned on a life raft with a tiger has been through many prospective directors, including Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men) and M. Night Shyamalan, and has yet to announce exactly who will be at the helm. Whoever takes on this task, it will be a very difficult film to make, although if it is executed correctly, the film will be amazing.

The problems lie with a) the film's setting, mostly in the Pacific Ocean on a twenty-foot-long boat, the majority of which is occupied by a 450 pound tiger, and b) with the whimsical and fantastic nature of the story which is both allegorical and real. Working with such an animal in any kind of shoot can be risky to begin with, but the actor who plays Pi and the tiger who stars as Richard Parker (the tiger's name) will be in such close quarters for the whole movie, it will be a film making nightmare. Pi's family also owns a zoo, which explains how the boy and the tiger end up together, and will require a barrage of animal actors that will make it costly and difficult. In the second instance, Yann Martel, the author of Life of Pi, lulls the reader into thinking that the book is based entirely on a true story ("one which will make us believe in God") and at the same time leaves us wondering what actually happened, even within the world of the novel. These two literary aspects will be so hard to capture on film, where it is hard to convince an audience they didn't actually see what you showed them.

Pi's fantastic story, which not only involves surviving starvation, thirst, the elements of sun and ocean, the appetite of a Bengal tiger and a man-eating island (yes, that's right), has a Shyamalan-esque ending that will leave audiences baffled. The only way for a filmmaker to attack this film will be to simply tell the story as it appears superficially. Forget the underlying questions of God and humanity and the will to live, and focus on the essentials; a boy and a tiger. If this is done, the film will be a spellbinding story of survival at sea and the audience will loose themselves in the depths of vast Pacific and feel the fear of being trapped with a man-eating tiger on a life boat. Martel's messages are strong and well-rounded, but to and transport them from page to moving picture will not work. Too much will be lost in the process and the film will suffer for it.

My advice, should it ever be made, is see the Life of Pi movie only after reading the book. Then you will feel the excitement of wondering how exactly this story can be translated to film. Even if it is a disaster, you will come away knowing what you know from the text, and what exactly the filmmakers were trying to accomplish and why they failed. If they fail, I should say, I don't mean to be so pessimistic.