If, as film critic Roger Ebert once said, “Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts,” then “Life of Pi” is one that lets the viewer, at the end, synthesize what they’ve seen and felt with what they know about the way the real world works offscreen. In a way, the ending is all-inclusive; it allows two or more things to be true at once, not unlike Pi’s own spirituality.
From an early age, we see how Pi had a keen interest in religion. Growing up, he tells us, the gods were his superheroes. Born in a zoo, named after the French word for swimming pool (piscine, which his classmates make fun of, since it sounds like “pissing”), Pi describes himself as a Catholic Hindu who was first introduced to God through Krishna. Then, after drinking some holy water on a dare, he comes to know the figure of Jesus Christ through his interrogations of a priest in the mountains of India. Soon, young Pi (Santosh Patel) is heeding the Muslim call to prayer, too.
Faith, as Pi sees it, is “a house with many rooms.” His nickname recalls the mathematical pi, “an irrational number of infinite length,” much of which he’s memorized. Basically, Pi believes in everything. However, his father — a pragmatic zookeeper, who plays the voice of scientific reason — tells him that’s the same as not believing in anything at all.
Whereas Pi is open-minded, trusting, and naïve enough as a kid to stick his hand through the bars of a tiger’s cage and offer Richard Parker raw meat, Pi’s father sees the supreme danger of such blind faith. “When you look into [the tiger’s] eyes,” he warns Pi, “you’re seeing your own emotions reflected back at you.”
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