This movie was so painful I began to hurt in places I didn’t know existed and in ways I didn’t realize were possible. My shoe pinched, the seat was lumpy and I got an unrelenting itch in a body part that I was too polite to address in public.
The movie is a slushy gathering of invalids and their unhappy lives; Dhanush is mute, Amitabh is muted and Akshaara is colorblind- for she only can see black or white, and she wears black all the time!
The compound title Shamitabh is made of two free morphemes, Dhanush+Amitabh. It took me quite a while to figure this one out since I didn’t know the bearded skinny malnourished nugget in the lead was none other than the worthy son in law of “The” Rajnikant.
Well, you might ask why such a title. Dhanush, though an amazing actor, on being denied entry into Bollywood because of his failed sound effects, joins Amitabh, an ex actor, with failed looks but an intact rumble. Together they make a team, a ragtag one though. Amitabh transfers his powerful guttural trademark growl into the vocal chords of Dhanush by means of a marvel of a chip planted in the limp larynx of the latter. So, dumb Dhanush acts in the foreground, while Amitabh remains in the shadows, reading lines into Dhanush’s voice box. Soon Dhanush becomes a superstar while Amitabh languishes in the anonymous shadows. Each thinks he’s more important than the other, much like the unresolved debate about the hen and the egg. A battle of egos breaks out between the two and they try to strike out on their own.
Do they flourish or do they perish? Do they get back together, if so how, if not then what is their fate scribed by the weary writer?
To say that this movie is an unabashed worship of Amitabh would be to make the understatement of the epoch. Men have been quick to turn away from what god commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of Amitabh.
Indians are genetically programmed for idol worship; we worship cows, stones, planets, and even books! We erect monuments after humans and prostrate before them; ranks of semi-divine edifices of Nagma, Jayalalitha, Sachin Tendulkar, and now NaMo, are swelling like the mighty Brahmaputra in the monsoons!
Whereas other religions may scoff at our idol worship as superstition, the veneration of the plaque containing the Ten Commandments, wearing a cross around one’s neck and displaying a star-moon symbol is no less idolatry. Even the blasting of Bamiyan Buddhas by the Afghan Taliban was a negative form of idol worship.
Idolatry is sanctified by Hindu religion; the Puranas and epics endorse them like spiritual toothpaste you can bet will rinse and cleanse your soul’s gateway. An idol helps dispel the abstraction of the concept of god, faith and religion, and instead provides a ready image that appeals to the feeble and the imaginatively challenged. It is the symbol, the yantra that aids concentration and meditation. It is also the symbol of god’s omniscience and omnipresence and our own candid admission of helplessness before it.
But worship half done; weariness of prayer, lukewarmness of faith, is the worst form of blasphemy, and not flattery at its most subtle. And that’s what this movie is, lukewarm worship, and not subtle flattery.
In a movie where the entire space is cornered by the two superstars, what does poor, lame duck Akshaara do other than flick away errant locks that obstruct her myopic vision, and show off a badly drawn tattoo across her plump back? Speaking in a confused convent-mumbaiya-thambi accent, does she get rid of her puppy fat and black wardrobe, or not?
Spend a couple of crispies to find out this much and more.
Seek for yourself the answer to why the audience has panned this movie and critics like me have long prayed for something like this to come to the screen so that they can let their imagination run wild and soak their quills in the blood of characters to be slain on the battlefield of melodrama.
The movie reminds me of ‘Black’, ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, ‘Koshish’ and ‘The Water boy’, and how this one rots in comparison.
A last word about the music- it is ho-hum.
Avoid!