Life of Pi

Directed by Ang Lee

(PG)

****

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Magical realism has rarely been so magical and “never before so real,” said Richard Corliss in Time. From its first frame, this bold adaptation of Yann Martel’s best-selling 2001 novel about an Indian teenager at sea with a tiger “declares its intention to astound the viewer with the hitherto untapped properties of 3-D.” As these two unlikely survivors of a shipwreck “achieve a tense détente” on their lifeboat, “Life of Pi looks neither natural nor egregiously fake, but vivid, as if a knob had been turned way up on the color of each object’s spirit,” said David Edelstein in New York magazine. There are some “clunky” interludes included to remind us that the story we’re seeing is told from memory, but even those pay off in this “transcendent” film. Actually, “I could have done without the boy’s search for God,” said David Denby in The New Yorker. Too much time is spent on his life before the wreck just to set up that theme. But once the action starts, the ocean and sky teem with life, and Pi “becomes one of the great adventure films”—“the kind of overwhelming sensuous feast that is possible only in cinema.”