Movie review: 'Life of Pi'

From a screenplay by David Magee (“Finding Neverland”), based on a much-loved best-selling novel by Yann Martell (“We Ate the Children Last”), Lee tells the story of Piscine Militor Patel, Pi for short (played as a boy by Ayush Tandon, as a grown man by Irrfan Khan, and in the heart of the movie as a 17-year-old boy by newcomer Suraj Sharma), who grows to a teenager in Pondicherry, India, in the 1970s.

The son of a zoo owner who is a stern father (Adil Hussain), Pi lives around all sorts of exotic creatures, including monkeys, hippos, zebras and a Bengal tiger by the name of Richard Parker. Pi forms his own ideas about God, faith and the nature of humans — and animals — early on in his life, insisting that evidence of a soul within an animal can be seen in its eyes. At one point as a small boy he even makes an attempt to befriend the tiger, but his father intercedes and teaches him about the savage instincts of carnivorous animals in a very brutal away. “The tiger is not your friend,” the father rails at his son. “Animals don't think like we do. People who forget that get themselves killed!”

Pi carries that lesson into his adolescence, when the changing political climate of his country forces his family to sell the zoo and board a Japanese cargo ship to Canada with all their worldly possessions and some of their animals. When the ship is sunk in a violent storm, Pi is cast adrift in a lifeboat with an extremely unwelcome companion — Richard Parker.