Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi,” which opens the New York Film Festival tonight, is the best-looking film I’ve seen this year. It’s hynotically beautiful. It uses 3-D better than anything I’ve seen since “Avatar” and the CGI work is superb — especially the computer-animated Bengal tiger named Richard Parker who plays a central role.
Part travelogue and part nature documentary, “Life of Pi” is mostly a family-friendly art film that like so much Hollywood product these days seems to be aimed primarily at an international (i.e., not American) audience. To describe it in a somewhat flippant showbiz shorthand, it’s “Cast Away” in life boat — with an Indian teenager and Richard Parker instead of Tom Hanks and Wilson.
Suraj Sharma, the 17-year-old newcomer who plays the shipwrecked and orphaned Pi(scene) Patel, does a fine job and gets better as the film goes along. But don’t expect the kind of Hanks-like charisma that would help rivet your interest during a two-hour film with lengthy wordless sequences. And Sharma just can’t match the soulfulness of Irrfan Khan, the seasoned Indian actor who plays the adult version of his character, relating his fantastic youthful adventures (which stretch over a period of months) to a writer played by Rafe Spall.
“Life of Pi” has lots of thrilling moments, and is sometimes quite magical, but even Lee’s best work — “Crouching Tiger” is the major exception — tends to move at a pace that’s relatively langorous by American indie standards. In this adaptaion of Yann Martel’s bestseller (which I haven’t read), Lee and screenwriter David Magee straddle a fine line between magic realism and fantasy (with a heavy dose of metaphysical philosophy and religious allegory) that may or may not resonate with mainstream American audiences drawn in by all that eye candy.
But it’s certainly a more than respectable choice to open the 50th edition of the New York Film Festival — though it sure looks like they preferred “The Master,” which graces the cover of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s latest issue of Film Comment. (The Weinstein Co. abruptly moved up its release, opening in two weeks ago).
My colleague Kyle Smith is predicting Best Picture and Best Director nominations for “Life of Pi” come Oscar time, and others who haven’t seen it consider it a contender. While I think “Pi” will be a major contender in the technical categories, I think it will need some critical champions to break through for the top awards, where the competition looks a lot fiercer than it did last year. I wasn’t feeling that kind of enthusiasm at yesterday’s press screening for a good film that I personally found easier to respect than to love.
Twentieth Century Fox (not its specialty firm arm Fox Searchlight) will be releasing “Pi” stateside in wide release the day before Thanksgiving. Lee said in introducing the film that he expected to continue making “tweaks” to the film over the next two weeks, so consider this a first impression of a work in progress.