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I think that the first thing to note about Life of Pi is that it is basically a kids' movie. It's rated PG (a fact I had apparently not noticed before buying my ticket). I had also forgotten that Life of Pi is in 3D. (The 3D works quite well and enhances the picture nicely, by the way; it isn't simply an unnecessary addition used to increase the price of your ticket.)

Ang Lee's film takes Yann Martel's survival novel (the book works like The Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe) and makes a kind of fairytale out of it, something magical and filled with wonder. In fact – and how often does one get to say this? – the movie is better than the novel. Much better. Lee is able to use both CGI and 3D in ways that bring the story to life in a way Martel's prose never does. The film works more like 2001: a Space Odyssey or one of Jules Verne's great novels, where there are always new things to discover, and the world is a place of remarkable synchronicity and spectacle.

Lee and his screenwriter David Magee (the magical storyteller behind Finding Neverland) also manage to deal brilliantly with the book's incredibly problematic third section. The movie cannot escape its source material's insistence on the quote power of storytelling unquote (something I found clichéd in both the novel and the film), but it manages to deal with the pitfalls of this banal aphorism by using the medium of film itself – well, digital cinematography, anyway – to illustrate the power of cinematic storytelling. You'll see what I mean when you see the picture. The end of the film is never shown, only narrated, whereas we see the entire middle section of the film, we're in it. The second version of the tale feels less real – necessarily so – because we never actually see it. Gérard Depardieu does not eat Bo-Chieh Wang's leg.

The performances are lovely. Suraj Sharma, in his first film role, is great as the younger Pi, and Irrfan Khan (whom you know from Slumdog Millionaire and Mira Nair's films Salaam Bombay! and The Namesake) is just superb as the older, Canadian Pi. Irrfan Khan gives one of my favorite performances of the year, in fact. He is truly lovely in the film. Indian megastar Tabu is also great as Pi's mom. I want to say, too, that I loved Mychael Danna's music. It's absolutely beautiful, and can hold its own with any other of this year's scores.

I had been worried about the CGI in the movie, and the truth is that Life of Pi doesn't always look real. In fact, an overwhelming majority of it looks computer-generated. But Lee deals with this, as well. The realistic scenes with Irrfan Khan and Rafe Spall, his interlocutor in Montréal in the present day, all have a similarly CGI-inflected feel. The effect of this is that the "real" feels artistic and computerized from the beginning, so that when a tiger jumps toward the camera (a lovely homage to Apocalypse Now) it struck me as just as "real" as the scenes at the adult Pi's kitchen table in Québec.

Like I said, though, Life of Pi is a kids' movie. Lee and Magee have softened the book's violence for the film. Violence always exists just out of the view of the camera; there is no blood at all (a shocking artistic choice, really); and one never truly feels that Pi is in any danger whatsoever. The cannibalism and murders in the book are completely excised for the film, allowing the movie to avoid the strange feeling I had when I finished the novel, that all of this fantasy and the cliché of "the power of storytelling" covered over something much more sinister. The film has none of these complications, making for a more straightforward tale, and to my mind a much less troubling one.

The religious element of the novel takes up a similar amount of space as it does in Martel's novel. I fail – as I did in the book – to understand how this section of the story makes any sense or has any relation to the rest of the tale. Sure, it's comical; Pi is a Hindu, a Christian, and a Muslim, and apparently sees no contradiction in combining the three religions. The film makes him a sort of Kabbalist, as well. But gods have basically nothing to do with the story/stories of Life of Pi. This is a tale of a young man and a Bengal tiger. The addition of religion seems a digression (at least it did to me) in both the novel and the film. At the very least, the tale told by Pi – his total abandonment of religious dogma and, indeed, many moral principles, while at sea due to (obviously) hunger and its attendant madness – seems to demonstrate the deficiencies of dogma when confronted with true life-or-death struggles such as, oh, you know, being abandoned at sea for the better part of a calendar year.

The film of Life of Pi is less about gods and more about the universe. This movie is a kind of paean to the beauty of the world in which we live, the world we think we know, but which holds many wonders that we can see if only we pay attention: the ocean and its vastness, the many animals of the world, the stars and the solar system, the extraordinary fact of edible plant life, even evolution. Life of Pi asks us to be grateful for these gifts, and entreats us to look at them with new eyes, thanking the universe for what it has granted us, that it has allowed us to perceive even the small part of the splendor it allows us to access.

Jolie's Snub

Angelina Jolie, though she was thought a veritable lock for an Oscar nomination this morning, was snubbed by the Academy. It's a snub that I predicted back in June when her movie, A Mighty Heart was released. I didn't see the movie and expected that Jolie would be overlooked come Oscar nomination morning. I was right.

The thing is, I had been avoiding the movie since June, but then I watched Mira Nair's The Namesake last week (it's really good, but I wish it were more intelligent than it is) and a slot opened up in my Netflix queue. By this time, everyone was naming Jolie as a lock for a nomination, so I thought I should relent and send away for it, even though the nominations didn't come out until this morning.

Fastforward to today, when, realizing she was snubbed, I now have wasted my Netflix slot. I mean, I still haven't seen Transformers or Norbit or Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, yet, right? And I need to send away for those movies. And now, since it didn't wind up getting any nominations, I don't need to see A Mighty Heart, which the trailer made look so sentimental and silly.

But I popped the DVD in tonight, figuring I would send it back to Netflix in the morning and clear some space for the movies I need to see now that they've been nominated (Surf's Up, In the Valley of Elah). Boy was I wrong. Angelina Jolie was seriously fucking robbed this morning. And the film is excellent.

As a matter of fact, the only thing wrong with A Mighty Heart is its cloying title. Michael Winterbottom's film, which is the story of Mariane Pearl, the wife of journalist Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped in Pakistan in 2002, is never dull, moves along at a rapid pace, and is edited like a memoir, interweaving tiny splices of the Pearl's lives together with the kidnapping crisis. It's also a kind of cubist retelling of the situation, taking snapshots of Pearl's parents, the police departments, CIA, and other journalists working the story in addition to Mariane Pearl herself. I found the film incredibly moving, and also searingly intelligent about U.S.-Middle East relations. Pearl is an amazing, heroic character and Jolie plays her with tenacity and an incredible inner power. It's a truly superb performance, and Winterbottom's film is one of my favorites for the year. I was a fool to wait this long.

Review: Vanity Fair

Mira Nair's films include the Oscar-nominated Indian film Salaam Bombay!, which is a beautiful/gritty exploration of working-class people, especially women, in modern India.  A year or two ago she had a film out called Monsoon Wedding, which was sort-of a musical and very highly respected.  Her films also include Kama Sutra: a Tale of Love, a light-on-plot, high-on-visual-elements (including sex scenes) confection.  Nair has also been asked to direct the film version of HP5 aka Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  Word is still out on whether she has accepted the offer.

Her new film is Vanity Fair, the first adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel of the same name to come out in something like half a century.  Like Nair's other films, this one is first and foremost a visual thing: the costumes are lavishly rendered and the makeup in the film would be interesting even without the film to help it along.  There are peacocks and elephants and macaws, and most numerous onscreen: stuffy white British people.  The film is set in Georgian England and centers around Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon), the daughter of a French chorus girl and a starving painter.  Vanity Fair chronicles Becky's slow, arduous climb into British high society and her much quicker free-fall out of it.

Witherspoon is perfect for the role for several reasons.  Her dialect is flawless, and though she is unmistakably American, this is an asset for ther character rather than a liability.  Becky never fits in at these soirées and various events she attends, and Nair doesn't have to do anything to tell us this.  Sometimes Becky is the star of the show, and sometimes she doesn't have a soul to talk to, but instead of us needing some kind of proof of this, we sense it on our own.  This girl is just not the same as those other people on the screen.

Before I go any further, I should say that I quite enjoyed myself at this film.  It has gotten fair to middling reviews around town, and no one I've spoken to has loved it, but it's actually a rather enjoyable piece of film, and as a study in Georgian class sensibilities it definitely has its value.  Eileen Atkins is very funny as Becky's benefactress early in the film, and Jim Broadbent gives an excellent performance in a role that should have been smaller.

The problem with the film is the script.  Julian Fellowes' adaptation of Thackeray's novel is a bit talky.  Fellowes also follows the story of Becky's friend Amelia (Romola Garai, who I hate) as a sub-plot, and she composes a good proportion of the film.  The trouble is that Amelia is not the least bit interesting, and has nowhere near the wit and grace of Becky.  Romola Garai is, not surprisingly, considerably uninteresting in the role.  I am not overstating this point.  The book is subtitled "A Novel Without a Hero," but the point of that would not seem to be that there are several protagonists.  Quite the contrary, Becky should have been Fellowes' focus from the get-go.  The entire subplot with Amelia is a distraction from what is going on in the novel.

Thackeray is trying to give us an anti-heroine with very questionable moral character.  He adds to this a society where a woman with these questionable morals can get ahead.  Fellowes tries to humanize the story (and the nobility) with this Amelia storyline and instead of accomplishing this it just gets in the way of what Thackeray is saying.

But the movie is good.  It is hardly ever boring, and chock-full of visual stimuli.  Witherspoon is engaging--not cruel enough for my taste--but I rarely get my heroines as cruel as I like them.  Broadbent and Atkins are both excellent in their supporting turns and James Purefoy is fair as Becky's longsuffering husband--if a little brooding.  Recommended.