Tag Archives: animals

Review: “Life of Pi”

26 Monday Nov 2012

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“Pi of the Tiger”
Grade: A- (SEE IT)

POET MARK DOTY asks in his “Meditation” of 2005: “Isn’t the great power of animal eyes that we can’t read them?”

It’s a profound question and the crux of Ang Lee’s dazzling adaptation of Yann Martel’s 2001 novel, “Life of Pi.” The titular role is played by Suraj Sharma, in his screen debut, and growing up on the Bay of Bengal, Pi locks horns with his unspiritual father (also a zoo-owner in the Indian city of Pondicherry). When Pi gets too close to the Bengal tiger kept in a cage out back, his father admonishes: “The tiger is not your friend.  When you look into its eyes, you see only your own emotions reflected back at you.”  His father’s lesson is that the animal is not a projection of human feelings but something entirely other. To prove his point, he ties a goat to the bars of the cage so that his sons can see that nature is not human but viciously red in tooth and claw.  Due to a clerical error, the tiger has been named Richard Parker, which is the film’s central joke, but also a significant part of the philosophical problem on Pi’s plate.  Notions of the “other” arise from psychoanalytic theories of object relations; the Other signifies everything the Self is not and stands as an obstacle to unity and social cohesion. The animal may look human – it may even have a man’s name – but it is nothing of the sort.  How, then, will Pi learn to live alongside the unknown?

Because “Life of Pi” is a fable, its plot-line is easy to relay.  It’s also the ultimate fisherman’s tale inasmuch as it may all be made-up. The film’s frame-story involves an older Pi (Irrfan Khan) narrating his story of adventure to another storyteller, a young writer (played by Rafe Spall), inside his Montreal apartment.  As a child in Pondicherry, Pi was an omnivore when it came to world religions; he drifted from Christianity and Judaism to Hinduism and Islam.  What do you expect from a mystical little boy whose very name is an abstract mathematical equation?   On being a Catholic Hindu, Pi tells us: “We get to feel guilty in front of hundreds of gods.”

Pi proceeds to recount his father’s decision to abruptly move his family to Canada, animals and all, and the shipwreck that left him stranded on a lifeboat alongside a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and the dreaded tiger.  The biblical overtones should be obvious enough: here we have Pi’s Ark, Pi’s faith tested, and Pi’s Christ-like resilience in the face of godly abandonment and indifference.  This will be lost on children, which is part of the film’s versatility.  Kids will no doubt marvel at “Li of Pi” for years to come because of its technical achievements: incandescent jellyfish, torpedo-like flying fish, an island of meerkats and flesh-eating vegetation.  Adults, meanwhile, will prefer to see Pi’s plight as an allegory and regard the tiger, as William Blake once did, in symbolic terms.

Much has been made of its “Avatar”-like special effects, but “Life of Pi” is also consistent with James Cameron’s 2009 classic in other ways. “Avatar,” too, stages a battle between humans and the animal-like other (those blue dudes with dog-ears and tails in Cameron’s case). If the Other is something too often demonized and ultimately conquered, “Avatar” saw the corporate destruction of the Na’vi of Pandora as a tragedy.  “Life of Pi” doesn’t deny that the battle between self and other is a violent one, but it’s more interested in making peace with the beast.

As in “Brokeback Mountain” (Lee’s last great film), which forced American audiences to reckon with a form of romance they don’t normally see nor understand, “Life of Pi” looks into the abyss of all social relations.  In “Brokeback,” otherness resides in the unreadable eyes of the self-hating Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) while in “Life of Pi,” that same haunting quality is right there in the eye of the tiger. Lee, who is nothing if not unsentimental, refuses to anthropomorphize the four-hundred-and-fifty-pound man-eater and “Life of Pi” is better for it.  Had Disney produced Martel’s book, the film would have ended with Pi and Tiger singing a duet but here, the tiger only stares with indifference and, without a word, slinks back into the jungle.

Review: “Chimpanzee”

21 Saturday Apr 2012

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“Stuffed Animals”

Grade: B- (RENT IT)

IN THE DARWIN wars of today, Richard Dawkins is sometimes called “Darwin’s bulldog” or most outspoken advocate.  But back in 1863, plenty of English naturalists came to Darwin’s defense, including Thomas Henry Huxley whose review of the Origin of Species helped to shape the public’s view of evolutionary biology.  In Man’s Place in Nature (published in London four years after Darwin’s Origin), Huxley wrote:  “On all sides I shall hear the cry – ‘We are men and women, not a mere better sort of apes, a little longer in the leg, more compact in the foot, and bigger in brain than your brutal Chimpanzees and Gorillas.  The power of knowledge – the conscience of good and evil – the pitiful tenderness of human affections, raise us out of all real fellowship with the brutes, however closely they may seem to approximate us.”  To this Huxley could only reply that no absolute line could be drawn between the “animal world and ourselves.”  He pointed in particular to the cerebral hemispheres of a Man and of a Chimpanzee to show their overwhelming similarities.

To further collapse the distance between man and monkey, there’s now “Chimpanzee,” the new wildlife film from Disneynature, which follows an orphaned chimp named Oscar in the Tai forest of Ivory Coast in Africa.  The film’s real strength is its dazzling cinematography: time-lapse sequences of jungle birds and glow-in-the-dark mushrooms.  Whether little Oscar knows it or not, he’s ready for his close-up and filmmakers Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield provide us with astoundingly up-close and personal angles of him cracking nuts, climbing trees, and, well, since this is Disney, looking downright adorable.  The only bit of pathos in “Chimpanzee” is when Oscar’s mother is slain by a rival group of chimps (led by the unimaginatively named Scar), leaving our little one to starve and scramble vainly to find new sources of support and sustenance.  Fortunately for Oscar, along comes Freddy, his group’s alpha male, who improbably adopts him and shows him the ropes.  Narrated by Tim Allen, “Chimpanzee” is a wonder to look at but the relentless anthropomorphizing of its star’s experience turns Oscar into a lifeless stuffed animal thrown atop a toy bin rather than a wild animal struggling to survive.  This is the only nature documentary that ignores the fierce fact that it’s a jungle out there.

Most of what really constitutes wild nature – the chimps’ strategic ambush of a colobus monkey after which they tear it limb-from-limb, the brutalities of mating and the threats of leopards – are kept carefully out-of-view.  “Chimpanzee” is designed for small children, after all, but to strip a wild animal of its wildness only to foreground its cuteness is to paradoxically control and contain it, which makes a trip to see “Chimpanzee” not so much an eye-opening experience but a trip to that most depressing of places, the city zoo.  Fothergill and Linfield leave you with the odd sense that a civilized animal is no animal at all.

Review: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

06 Saturday Aug 2011

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“Orangutangulous!”

Movie Review: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

Grade: B+/A- (SEE IT)

THE FACT THAT star James Franco (“Howl,” “Milk”) is currently studying British Romantic literature at Yale University in pursuit of his PhD – what’s next? Anne Hathaway as college chancellor? – may help to explain his initial attraction to the script for “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (2011), a  prequel to the “Planet of the Apes” franchise which will have you saying to yourself: Go monkey, go!   After all, it’s in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), that Romantic caveat of a classic which more or less spawned the entire science-fiction genre, that Victor Frankenstein describes his laboratory as that “workshop of filthy creation.”  What gives “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” its chill (and genuine thrill) is that the pharma-medical lab at the film’s center is anything but filthy.  Instead, the scientific headquarters known as Gen-Sys look like a state-of-the-art facility: sleek and silvery countertops, Plexiglas cages in which primates pace and occasionally scream out, Franco (as Will Rodman) in an immaculately white lab coat.

The glossy exterior of Gen-Sys belies what goes on behind (sliding and keypad-operated) doors: primates are routinely tested and tortured in pursuit of a cure for Alzheimer’s.  The drug restores memory in humans and turns primates into Super-Simians.   Rodman’s own dad, Charles (played by a befuddled looking John Lithgow) is himself an Alzheimer’s sufferer and another guinea pig for his son’s trials.  Therein lies the film’s recipe for disaster: just as Will is boasting to Gen-Sys’s investors that he and boss (smooth operator David Oyelowo) have found the cure, an ape known as Bright Eyes busts out of its cage and through the window to a board meeting only to be shot dead by security.  Bright Eyes leaves behind a baby chimp whom Will smuggles out of the lab and names Caesar.

It’s a portentous name, Caesar, and until he finally realizes the dictatorial power of his moniker, we’re left waiting for Caesar to rise and rule a maligned race of apes just dying for a leader.   With the help of Will’s panacea for Alzheimer’s, which he steals from the kitchen fridge, Caesar crosses the Rubicon into San Francisco and starts a revolution.  Who knew the City by the Bay had an incompetently run monkey house sitting on its borders like a ticking time bomb, and that silverback apes, looking for spears to throw at cop cars, could pull parking meters out of sidewalks like they’re picking daisies? In a film really about the horrors of captivity, this George is more furious than curious.

Director Rupert Wyatt (“The Escapist”) maintains a breezy pace as Caesar’s insurrection gathers speed and force.  One notable scene is set on Will’s street where drivers and pedestrians alike stop, mouths agape, to see something amazing:  scores of monkeys swinging through the trees above in a gathering storm.  The standoff on the Golden Gate Bridge is truly something to behold; one would be hard-pressed to think of another confrontation on film between ape and mounted policeman (ape: 1; S.F.P.D.: 0).  Though “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” delivers the exploding helicopters and car chases we expect from a summer blockbuster, Wyatt also maintains a thoughtful plea for animal liberation.  Sympathy was central for the Romantics, especially Mary Shelley whose Creature in Frankenstein longs for someone to sympathize with his plight, and the traces of that creed are still visible in Caesar’s all-too-human cries for freedom and non-violence.

The most affecting revelation in Frankenstein is when Shelley’s monster, with his “dull yellow eye,” confesses to his crimes, saying: “I’m malicious because I’m miserable.”  His motivation all along was the simple, childlike desire to be loved and needed, but looking the way he does, humans only reacted with fear and horror.  This is more or less the point of Wyatt’s eco-positive parable, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”: all monsters are man-made just as every futile attempt to contain the animal other via zoos and laboratories ultimately backfires.  So long as we continue to oppress all other species, the threat of their violent takeover will remain both a fear and a fantasy.

As a modern-day Frankenstein’s monster, Caesar wants to lead a bloodless revolution – he even stops his monkey underlings from killing humans indiscriminately – but it’s just not in the cards, especially in a Hollywood movie.  It’s telling that his only line in the movie is “No,” which he utters to the surprise of his inept jailers in the ape house.  If you’re listening, Patrick Doyle’s pulsing score will stay with you until you reach the parking lot, but it’s the final image of Caesar finally in his element, free (for now) in the treetops overlooking San Fran, that will enliven you long after.

For my review of Franco as poet Allen Ginsberg in “Howl,” see:

“A Movie Based On a Poem”

(Review of “Howl”) in the _G&LR_

http://www.glreview.com/article.php?articleid=316