Ang Lee’s Life of Pi is pretty explicitly about religion, specifically the stories religion uses to explain and understand human beings’ relationship with the world around them. One of the first lines you hear in the movie, often one of the first things you hear about the movie before even seeing it, is that the story is one that will “make you believe in God.” Of course, it sort of does this, but not in the way you would think going in.
The presentation of what we find at the end of the movie are two differing accounts of what happened to Pi Patel on his lifeboat in the Pacific. This is a little controversial for some people, but I think the point it’s meant to make is rather smart. Essentially, to deal with the harshness of his actual experience, Pi either thinks about what happened to him and the things he did, or else simply describes them to others, in made-up terms. That is, he fabricates a story that captures the experience on the lifeboat for him, but doesn’t stick to the straightforward facts.
It’s embellished, to say the least. But what that ends up doing is expressing an element of the experience for him, the emotions, the moral quandaries, the gravity of certain actions he had to take to survive. Thought about this way, as stuff that’s essentially made up but contains some truth that surpasses pure factual history, story is the basis of religion, and that makes faith compelling to think about and, for some, to practice.
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