It's a predictable framing device, and one might even roll an eye at its use early on, but Lee and screenwriter David Magee utilize this supposed predictability to their advantage, even if the ways in which they do so take a while to become clear.
A young writer (Rafe Spall) meets with Pi Patel (Irrfan Khan) on the vague hunch that Pi's life would make a good book. It's a film that's talked about reverently, if not as often as some of its decade-old peers, and part of this retrospective will be an attempt to determine why. The very fact that we are revisiting "Life of Pi" as part of our 2012 retrospective speaks to its quality (never mind the fact that Lee took home a second Best Director Oscar).
Would "Life of Pi" be another? I don't think I'm spoiling anything by saying that Lee prevailed. Lee was a slam dunk when it came to somber, humanist dramas like "Brokeback Mountain" and "The Ice Storm" (1997), but his lone foray into CG filmmaking, "Hulk" (2003), was an airball. The gig eventually fell to Ang Lee, who had already nabbed a Best Director Oscar for his stirring adaptation of "Brokeback Mountain" (2006). The difficulty can be gleaned from the roster of names that were attached to direct but ultimately passed: Alfonso Cuaron, M.
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The story of a teenager stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger made for insightful literature, but turning it into a film meant having to figure out how to make such a harrowing premise realistic. There was so much working against the screen adaptation of "Life of Pi" (2012).