PIETY WRECKS ANG LEE’S ‘LIFE OF PI’

By Armond White

No one can make a dull film like Ang Lee can. His new Life of Pi doesn’t settle for being a 3D extravaganza. At a reported cost of $70 million and three years in production, it is intended to combine philosophical rumination with a tent-pole thrill ride. So soon after Hugo, another presumptuous art-house folly, this one from the book by Yann Martel is titled for a young Indian boy named after the French word for swimming pool, “piscine.”

Typical of Ang Lee, the name is also meant to suggest highbrow mathematical contemplation as teenage Pi (played by Suraj Sharma) naively embraces all the world’s religious beliefs. His youthful optimism gets tested when his family is shipwrecked during a storm in the South Pacific and he is stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger.

Pi is hardly challenged by variations of human behavior, which should be the basis of philosophical pondering and introspection. Instead, Lee treats Pi’s childhood taunts and romance blithely—like trite imitation of Wes Anderson eccentricities. But once Pi’s adventures get going, Lee designed the film as a series of large-scale, digital images, perhaps to entail the wonders of nature and the cosmos. Lee’s literalized 3D compositions (often melding sea and sky) are both overwrought and underwhelming.

Life of Pi is a movie for those people—and there are many—who don’t appreciate the style of visionaries such as Bernardo Bertolucci, John Boorman, Brian DePalma, Leos Carax, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Paul W.S. Anderson, Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, John Moore, Olivier Megaton, Wes Anderson, Steven Spielberg and Wong Kar Wai. How else to explain the unjust dismissal of Bertolucci’s magnificent 1994 Little Buddha, which combined the modern search for faith with the historical marvel of Buddha’s enlightenment? When Bertolucci’s contemporary 35mm scenes shifted to 65mm for the ceremonial splendor of the period flashbacks, the transition in detail, grandeur and luxe could make a viewer gasp—and grasp the essential richness of faith.

In Life of Pi, Lee’s prosaic approach to the boy’s adventures from Titanic-style storm to a floating island of meerkats exposes his basic uncinematic nature. He’s such an innately dull storyteller that he ends the film with a monologue where middle-aged Pi (played by Irrfan Khan) asks, “Which story do you prefer?” I’d prefer the shorter one we never got to see.

Film Forum’s current retrospective series, “The French Old Wave” (through Sept. 13), continues with more classic films and film history that you need to catch up with in order to realize—in this awful era of comic- book frivolity—how great cinema can be.

Though billed as a tribute to the “quality” films that Truffaut and Godard, the revolutionary mid-century directors of the New Wave, disdained, the fact is, these films represent the heritage that was also the French New Wave’s foundation.

Film Forum’s reclamation informs our own era’s habits as cinephilia declines and the cinematic past becomes a morass—disrespected, cluttered, uncategorized and forgotten. Would so many indie films be as vapid if filmmakers (and film critics) knew film history? A highly praised feature like Your Sister’s Sister not only seems uninformed by cultural heritage but downright hostile to it, pretending originality when it’s only sophomoric.

At Film Forum, priceless antiques such as The Earrings of Madame De … , The Story of a Cheat, Under the Roofs of Paris and Forbidden Games carry the secret of all great films—the essence of culture—by offering vivid insights into the complexities of human experience.

There are some obscurities here, but the classics predominate, and these are films that, given this ahistorical period of cultural amnesia, cannot be presented too often. For those seeking an essential film education, the Renoir wing of this exhibition is crucial: Grand Illusion, Rules of the Game and La Bete Humaine are not just landmarks but signposts for living.

It’s exciting to visit the “old wave” and see how new it remains. Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (Sept. 9) shames the shrillness of the Disney animated musical, and other than the recent films of Mexican master Julian Hernandez there is nothing in contemporary cinema like Cocteau’s Orphee (Sept. 9)—not just a modernized version of the Orpheus myth but an examination of the thrill in art and the erotic excitement of cultured sensibility.

One old master who deserves rediscovery is Rene Clair, and a double bill of his masterpieces Le Million and A Nous la Liberte (Sept. 5) will be a revelation to those CGI- and 3D-besotted fanboys who don’t yet know the transcendent qualities of filmmaking that is rhythmed and bursting with good humor. The sanity and buoyancy of Clair’s films was at one time considered the height of the art form (A Nous la Liberte even influenced Chaplin’sModern Times); Clair’s visionary work might be the salvation of new mediamakers who mistakenly confuse “darkness” with creativity. Perfectly named, Clair believed in light.

And surely, those poets and prophets of the French New Wave knew it. The Film Forum program includes lesser lights such as Jean Gremillion, but Gremillion was also part of the same tradition as Renoir and Cocteau and Clouzot and Clement and Ophuls and Guitry; Gremillion just wasn’t as great. But they all contributed to the humanities—to the civilization of filmgoers—and that’s a habit that today’s filmmakers and filmwatchers need to recover. As Jean-Luc Godard said, “There is no new wave, there is only the ocean.”

Follow Armond White on Twitter @3xchair