'Life of Pi' trailer looks (too) dreamy

Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi was published in 2003, and it became a bestseller and book club phenomenon shortly after. The story of a boy's survival on a life raft after a shipwreck had a haunting and inspiring narrative that resonated with readers. Unlike, say, The Hunger Games, I have always been doubtful that the book would make a good movie. The storyteller is an unreliable narrator. What he sees is not always reality, and audiences tend to chafe at any plotlines that end with the reveal "it was all a dream." That's a rough approximation of the ending of the book, which relies heavily on a final Sixth Sense-like twist that changes the entire 300 pages before it. The trailer for director Ang Lee's feature adaptation, which is set for a prime Thanksgiving release, just hit the Internet. The sets look like surreal compositions created on a nearby soundstage, a little too dreamy for my taste.

The scenes with the lifeboat marooned in glassy, motionless water feel the most artificial to me. I was a little reminded of director Peter Jackson's adaptation of another bestseller, The Lovely Bones. That drama was also told through the lens of a unique narrator, a murdered child. The ephemeral dreaminess of her narrative wasn't captured successfully on film. To compensate, there were scenes set in heaven that were there more for purposes of tone, not narrative, and those were the biggest red flags for me.

 

 

I certainly hope I'll be proved wrong, but I can think of very few movies that successfully show a narrator's altered reality and then follow it up with another version of reality. Even in short dream sequences, audiences often feel cheated. That explains why Oliver Stone's Savages (which has multiple endings) got a terrible C+ rating in exit polls. Or why horror movies sometimes follow up the "it was all a dream" section with another one that reveals, in fact, the monsters or whatever is plaguing the victim are in fact real. "People with distorted perspective" movies like Taxi Driver and The Shining have sometimes worked, and the dream concept is also popular in sci-fi movies like The Matrix and Inception (which at least gave a reason for their altered realities). With its stunning visual images and literary roots, Life of Pi is clearly Oscar bait. But will critics and audiences bite?