Monday, January 21, 2013

Life of Pi

"There is a famous formula, perhaps the most compact and famous of all formulas...It appeals equally to the mystic, the scientist, the philosopher, the mathematician."
-Edward Kasner and James R. Newman, "Mathematics and the Imagination"

Pi is a a mystic and a philosopher. His parents are scientists, though they named him not after the mathematical equation but after a swimming pool, the Piscine Molitor pool in France. Piscine, or Pi, mostly rejects his parents' lack of faith because "to choose doubt as a philosophy of life," the author Yann Martel mentions in the book, "is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation."  This is a fascinating thought, and I wished it would have made it to the film. Unfortunately, much of this deeper thinking is omitted; instead, we are treated to more of a visual experience. Pi may be a philosopher as is the author, but director Ang Lee is a visual artist. As an artist, he is remarkable and deserves his nomination for Best Director.  But with "Life of Pi," he hasn't been able to marry the visual with everything else like he did with "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Brokeback Mountain."

Pi's ship is called the Tzimtzum, which (I'm quoting Wikipedia) explains the concept that "God began the process of creation by 'contracting' his infinite light in order to allow for a 'conceptual space' in which a finite and seemingly independent world could exist." As we expect, the ship crashes and kills (we are to assume) not only the crew members but also most of the zoo animals belonging to his family. I say most because a Bengal tiger survives and fights for control of the lifeboat with Pi. Here on this boat is where Pi wakes up to find this infinite light, and now he is independent. It is this moment that Lee is at his finest. This is also the beginning of the second act and it's where Lee sometimes forfeits his storytelling ability to visually amaze us.

The first act shows us a young Pi (Ayush Tandon) as a teenager in school. His classmates have a lot of fun with his name ("Look, he is Piscine!" and "Are you Piscine right now?"). To avoid such mockery, he triumphantly ties the mathematical concept of pi to all his courses, chiefly with his math course as he writes all the numbers of pi on the board. The scenes with Tandon as Pi were my favorite because they embraced the coming-of-age aspect of the story. Here Pi is not a scientist like his parents but embraces not simply Hinduism but also Christianity and Islam--he praises Vishnu while also praying with the sign of the cross before his meals and praying five times a day towards Mecca. But as a young man (Suraj Sharma), he loses his faith(s) and is disappointed to hear that his family is moving their zoo to Canada. If you've seen the trailer, you've seen the gist of what happens next.

While barely surviving the ship's sinking, he's trapped on a small lifeboat with the tiger, the tiger his father warned him is not his friend. The tiger's name is Richard Parker, and it's best to hear why it's named that from the movie and not in this review. The second third is where Pi and Richard Parker struggle not only to survive but also to determine who will control the boat. The scenes are intriguing, but as mentioned before, the viewer has likely already seen a good chunk of this stuff from the trailer (I must stop watching trailers), and it's where Lee starts to try to impress us too much. The deeper thinking submits to visual effects, and obvious allegories are only briefly touched on. The third act is where the wheels really start to fall off.

This is not to say that "Life of Pi" is not a good movie. It is. And one of the reasons why it's so good is not only its visuals but also its fine performance by Sharma. He is virtually the only performer in the movie, and most of the time (I'm assuming) he's working with a CGI-tiger. This is Sharma's first movie, and I hope to see many more featuring him. As a visual experience, "Life of Pi" is a commendable job by Lee and his effects crew. As compelling, unforgettable storytelling, it's less appealing.


Friday, January 4, 2013

Lincoln

With malice towards none. This quote, I believe, does more to define President Abraham Lincoln than any other. Delicately balancing the enormous difficulties of his time in office, knowing when to give in and when not to compromise, Abraham Lincoln was a gentle man. Years ago, I read David Herbert Donald's biography of him which recounted one of his aides complaining that he wouldn't be surprised if Lincoln allowed his young son to use Lincoln's boot (or maybe it was his hat) as a toilet, and Lincoln would probably find it humorous.

Daniel Day-Lewis portrays Lincoln this way: a kind intellectual who would rather not fight but will if he has to. He loses his temper as most presidents do. (According to Jonathan Alter's "The Promise," aides who worked for both President Clinton and President Obama, Clinton's tendency was to explode with range and humiliate someone, then apologize with a big hug. Obama's way is much more powerful: a cold stare, terrible silence, and no apology.)  Lincoln does not want to fight, but he will if he has to. A fan like everyone else of Daniel Day-Lewis, I was concerned that after watching him in Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York" and Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood," Day-Lewis would overdo it. As Abraham Lincoln he does not. He understands that most of the time he has to be subdued, with malice towards none. He doesn't need to be passionate, because that quality comes from Lincoln's wife, played by Sally Field, and the leader of the Radical Republicans, Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) who always pushed Lincoln to move faster. At times, Mrs. Lincoln and Representative Stevens quarrel in public, as seen in one of the best scenes where Mrs. Lincoln gives Stevens a calm, cheeky diatribe, and Stevens, in the presence of the president, must stand there and accept it.

With the focus of a benign president in malevolent times (he is pointedly asked by an opponent how many hundreds of thousands of have men died during his time in office), we are spared some of the more mythological elements of the Lincoln story, and that is how it should be. Henry Ford's "Young Mr. Lincoln," which is still the best of the Lincoln film versions, shows us Lincoln as a lawyer; here that would be entirely unnecessary. (Sean Wilentz has an interesting article in the New Republic about this Lincoln movie and the Lincoln myth first set by D.W. Griffith's controversial "The Birth of a Nation.") Instead, we see Lincoln as a masterful politician, creating slightly unethical ways of securing passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. We get glimpses of Lincoln as a scholar, Lincoln as a husband, Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief, and Lincoln as a borderline-dictator. As the joke goes, Lincoln and other presidents may have suspended habeus corpus, but at least Lincoln told us.

Still, I couldn't help but feel a bit underwhelmed by Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln." One doesn't have to go back decades to find better movies from the master, just look at the movies he made last year. He combined new technology with old, "Indiana Jones"-esque material in "The Adventures of Tintin" and made his tribute to the Golden Age of Hollywood with "War Horse." "Lincoln" is a movie about one of our greatest presidents; "War Horse" is about a British boy's horse in World War I. I should have been much more engaged with "Lincoln" but in retrospect found "War Horse," as imperfect as it was, much more enjoyable.    

But undeniable praise should be given to Day-Lewis, considered by many to be the front-runner for this year's Best Actor winner. Unfortunately, even though he is in the vast majority of this film, it's too little, and we spend too much time with characters either less interesting and/or played by less talented actors. Some of the interesting performances are from Hal Holbrook (who once played Lincoln) as a conservative Republican more interested in ending the war than ending slavery, David Strathairn as Secretary of State William Seward, and a trio of John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson, and James Spader as the three dispatched by Lincoln to come up with more votes to pass the Amendment.  But this is Day-Lewis' movie, as it should be, and for his performance alone, it is recommendable.



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