A Comparison of the Film and the Novel of Life of Pi

Oftentimes, one’s favorite novel is adapted to the big screen, and much valuable content is lost in the process. Due to time constraints, Hollywood standards, and differing views on aspects of the story, movies frequently end up offering viewers an entirely different media experience than the books off of which they are based. Fortunately, director Ang Lee managed to do an impressive job convening Yann Martel’s Life of Pi to film format. All the central elements of the plot are present, as are the major character developments.

However, two aspects of the movie do stand out as quite different from the novel: the removal of secondary characters and the conclusion (specifically, the “better story” aspect). While most characters remain relatively unchanged from the book, one disappointing omission is the man whom Pi thinks he encounters on the boat. Toward the end of Martel’s novel, after Pi has been stranded on his lifeboat for a few months, he starts going insane from the heat and lack of food.

During this period of time, Pi says that he runs into another shipwrecked individual: a man who, like Pi, got lost at sea alone. Starved, the man attacks Pi; however, before Pi is harmed, Richard Parker (Pi’s tiger, who lives on the lifeboat with Pi) kills the man. It is not difficult to see why this scene failed to make the movie: the killing of a human by a tiger is undeniably violent, and the film is, after all, rated PG.

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Still, its absence was a let-down for me, as the scene marked the first less-than- believable element of Pi’s narrative —the likelihood of two stranded man simply bumping into one another in the middle of the ocean is very low. This foreshadowed that Pi may not be a perfectly honest storyteller — a major theme at the end of the book.

In fact, the whole theme that sometimes fiction is better than reality — which was a major part of the book s was heavily downplayed in the film. Following several less-than-believable elements of the story (e.g. the man who attacks Pi and the carnivorous island), the novel cuts to a scene where Pi is interrogated by two men from the shipping company that built the boat which sunk and left Pi stranded. After he tells them the story where he lives on the lifeboat with the tiger, they push him for a more “believable” story. At this point, he tells them that he was stranded with his mother, a cook, and a sailor. While this is a more plausible explanation, Pi pauses for a while before conveying it, and his frustration with his interrogators seems to suggest that he made up the story for them just so they would leave him alone. However, insufficient information is given, so the reader is left uncertain which story is true. This hints at the theme of Life of Pi: that one can never be absolutely certain about reality, and that sometimes the tale that seems more fictitious can be more enjoyable to live with.

In the movie, however, it is much more clear which story is true. Pi does not pause before telling the story about the cook, and he becomes visibly upset while talking to the interrogators; this suggests that the second story is true. while the first was very clearly fiction. Therefore, the movie removes the element of mystery that was a core part of Martel‘s work of literature. This, too, disappointed me as the book‘s uncertainty about the reality of Pi’s life was intriguing and unique. Thus, the Life ofP/did undergo a few changes in its transition from paper to screen. Due to the restrictions of movie ratings, the man who attacked Pi did not appear in the movie; and likely as a result of an attempt to appeal to more simple-minded viewers, the delicate nature of Martel’s questioning of reality was likewise omitted from the film. Still, most major plot developments were present, and I enjoyed Ang Lee’s movie almost as much as Manel’s book.