Director Ang Lee takes on the 'unfilmable' 'Life of Pi'

Published in 2001, Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel “Life of Pi” was instantly deemed unfilmable. And so, like that other “unfilmable” novel, “Cloud Atlas,” it has, of course, been turned into a movie – with rather happier results.

The reason for the trepidation is obvious: Much of the action takes place on a 27-foot lifeboat inhabited by a teenage Indian boy and a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Since, as one of the film’s producers has put it, they didn’t want their leading man eaten during production, a team of CGI wizards have fashioned what must be the most realistic computer-generated animal ever seen.

Ang Lee, directing from a script by David Magee, is extraordinarily versatile. “The Ice Storm,” “Sense and Sensibility,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “The Hulk,” “Brokeback Mountain” – the only common linkages here are Lee’s contemplative sensibility. In that sense, the 3-D “Life of Pi” isn’t all that much of a leap for Lee, except technologically.

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There’s plenty of downtime aboard that raft in which to dramatize the meaning of life, not to mention how to avoid becoming tiger bait.

Piscine, or Pi, as he dubs himself, grows up in India in the paradisiacal former French colony of Pondicherry, where his father operates a zoo. When hard times hit, the decision is made to decamp to Canada and sell the animals, but a violent storm upturns the cargo ship en route and all are lost – animals, family – save Pi (played as a teenager by newcomer Suraj Sharma) and an orangutan, a zebra, a hyena, and that tiger, to whom Pi gives the name Richard Parker.