Life of Pi is one of those movies that no longer is a movie in your head after you see it. It's a pattern of wallpaper from your childhood, a beautiful/horrible incident that you recover from but never get over, a look a school-bus driver gives you in his rear view mirror, a fading sunset in the basement of your best friend's grandma's house after a flood... In short it's pure poetry with an engine of narrative so efficient you don't feel the story as story, the movie as movie. You feel the story as myth/nostalgia/ache/absurdity/beauty. I could go on about how Ang Lee is a genius, about the CGI and the 3D effects, about the brevity and kindness of both the novel and the screenplay... But I just want to concentrate on the experience of having gone through this "thing." It's a dream that doesn't linger as much as reverberate, like post traumatic stress disorder.
And then, toward the end, that tiger Pi loved and needed to love just walking away from him into the darkness of a jungle. That's wisdom turned inside out, sentiment too. Nothing means anything, and yet everything is alive with meaning.
The best movie of the year.
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