~~~~~Shamitabh Movie Reviews~~~~~ - Page 2

WRITTEN BY

Written By Rachit Gupta

Features Editor

Posted Fri, Feb 6, 201

Director: R Balki
Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Dhanush, Akshara Haasan



There is only one Amitabh Bachhan. And all he needs to prove his greatness are 10 minutes right at the end of a film. He doesn't even need to speak to sway his audience. And yet he's gifted with a voice that's beyond compare. In essence, Shamitabh is a homage to his persona. And yet R Balki's film is so much more. Its a sublime satire on the movie world. Its a poignant reflection on the price of stardom. This is easily one of the best movies of 2015.

Dhanush and Amitabh come together to make Shamitabh. Dhanush plays a dumb village boy who comes to Mumbai to become an actor. He might not look like a star, but he has a talent for intensity and emotion. All hes lacking is a bridge of communication. Amitabh Bachchan plays a failed and washed up actor who never even got a chance. He's a drunken sod who has that magical voice. The marriage of their talents creates an aura called Shamitabh. Balki chooses to go with a sci-fi plot development to let Dhanush have Amitabh's voice. Doctor's in Finland discover a way of projecting another person's voice through a dumb person's throat using a microchip. If you don't get into the actual science of the idea, it seems engaging enough albeit a bit odd. Its the weakest part of the story. But its also the most novel. It enables infinite possibilities for the filmmaker and that's exactly what Balki capitalises on.

From the very first frames its evident Balki is paying tribute to Indian as well as western cinema. From Ranbir Kapoor in Rockstar to Marlon Brando in The Godfather... the messages are loud and clear. Such is the impact of cinema that it can even inspire a vocally impaired man to dream of being an actor. Shamitabh is peppered with many such poetic observations. The script and the dialogue are fantastic. But there's a bit of a glitch in the screenplay. Its designed in a manner that allows you to guess what will happen in the climax. Not that the predictability robs you of any dramatic punch, but its not as smooth as it could've been.

The one area where Shamitabh doesn't falter is its performances. Amitabh Bachchan, Dhanush and Akshara Haasan are the three main leads. It helps that each has a perfectly etched out character to portray. Also the casting is bang on. The idea of Dhanush having Amitabh Bachchan's baritone is executed with precise sound effects. But the reason you believe that's Shamitabh talking is thanks to Dhanush's performance. His talent and on-screen charisma are brilliant. Amitabh Bachchan needs no validation. And yet, he gets an entire film to showcase all that has gone in making him a legend. He's playing drunk so he gets to relive the days of comedic slur from Amar Akbar Anthony. The monologue where he talks to a poster of Robert Deniro is simply awesome. He gets to revisit the intensity of Zanjeer and Coolie too. And then right at the end he out does his act in Black. Akshara Haasan was made for her role. Her character is somewhere between Goth and Geek. Its unusual but very appropriate. She becomes the voice of logic between two male egos. Her character's involvement is incidental and Akshara is natural enough to make it seem authentic.

All said and done, Shamitabh is a film unlike any other. Its themes are dark and deep. Its observations are candid and funny. Like any good film, its a mixture of art and mart. Songs like Piddly si baatein and She sha sha mi mi entertain. And then there are wonderful reflections on the film world. In a scene Dhanush conveys to Akshara that the film they're making is too arty and not commercial enough. Same goes for Shamitabh. It's a wonderful idea, straight from the heart. But end of the day its not a crowd pleaser. It is though a moving argument to why we love a phenomenon called Amitabh Bachchan.

This just in: Amitabh Bachchan, an actor some of you might have heard of, has a pretty good voice.

What? Not exactly breaking news? Yet director R Balki seems newly aware of that revelation, and, it appears, believes that mere worship of the Big B-aritone is enough to make for a fine film. An ode to that voice might have made sense in the 70s, before the Bachchan voice was absolutely everywhere, mimicked by anyone, used to sell us anything. The radio stations who rejected Amitabh Bachchan have become as legendary in their infamy as the record producers who first passed on The Beatles; that voice has literally launched careers; and, even today, over 40 years since we first heard it, it overwhelms " in fact, as evidenced by the televised reaction of unsuspecting citizens across the country when they receive a gameshow phone-call that starts with that silken-yet-growled Hello, it strikes like lightning.

To dedicate a whole film to applauding that voice, then, seems like a stretch... but then Balki, despite ingenuity and quirks, always ends up tugging at initially inventive ideas out till they feel like week-old bubblegum. Shamitabh, a film where a mute actor is voiced by an older actor, sets up the premise so completely and obviously with the opening scene that it's hard not to wonder where the film will go over the remaining 150 minutes. The answer: it meanders on and on, like an old man lost in a car park. Bachchan is excellent, Dhanush does well, but both are straitjacketed by a flimsy, uneven story that is eventually just exhausting.

It starts off with promise. Dhanush plays Danish, a village boy fathered by the movies, a mute boy who believes he can act better than the biggest superstar, who turns his head at 48-frames-per-second, and is passionate enough to believe his voicelessness won't get in the way of his impending stardom. Starting off as a bus conductor (just like another superstar you may have heard of) he makes his way to big bad Bombay, impresses an assistant director, and is then whisked off to Finland.

It is at this point that I decided Balki was giving us not a film aiming at truth but a preposterous fable, because his Finland is a ventriloquist-worshipping country dedicated to making state-of-the-art human puppets, fitting voice-boxes inside human throats and letting the mute person lip-sync someone else's time-delayed conversation. It's awful writing, immediately removing the "How?" struggle from the equation; in Woody Allen's Hollywood Ending, when a blind director tries to direct a film without anyone knowing he's blind, the results are hilarious because he's trying to find on-set help, memorising floor-plans, and so on. Here we see Dhanush speaking in the Bachchan baritone and when we wonder how it's come about, we're told simply that the filmmaker wanted to make it happen.

Add to that a drunken mentor " Bachchan, as an old drunkard hired to voice Danish " and the first half of Shamitabh is basically Nagesh Kukunoor's Iqbalwith a lot less heart and a lot more indulgence. It's tiresome, poorly shot, suffering from an atrociously patchy sound-design and inconsistent dubbing, and " despite an an energetic Dhanush, and Bachchan revelling in his self-aggrandizing role, painfully armed with look-how-great-my-voice-is' lines designed to elicit taalis " the film never quite gets going. And that's the good bit. Following intermission, it careens off the rails so catastrophically it feels an uncredited Bhandarkar/Bhansali lent the writing team a hand.

Dhanush is a highly effective actor (and when miming actors, his shorthand from Hrithik to Ranbir is particularly brilliant), but Balki, keen to keep the focus on The Baritone, doesn't show us any of Danish's skills; his audition is ordinary, his histrionics mediocre, with the point underscored by Bachchan repeatedly telling him that he doesn't look good, and (in a particularly distasteful line) that The Baritone is enough to make even a dog shine on screen. Danish's part is a thankless one, that of an ambitious, opportunistic jerk who never cares for those around him, while Bachchan is given everything from the idiosyncratic life to longwinded Scotch-and-water soliloquys to a horrible face-off with a Robert De Niro poster. All that and, like Captain Haddock, he can curse in every letter of the alphabet. It's a depressingly one-sided match. (Somewhere in the middle is a frustrated, interesting yet occasionally too-loud Akshara Haasan, perhaps thinking wistfully about the time her dad Kamal did a silent film...)

What Balki subverts truly cleverly, though, as an ad-man, are his advertisers: there's a whole lot of product placement here " Lifebuoy, Amazon, Seven Hills " but each brand is mocked: the soap's tagline is ridiculed, the online-retailer doesn't have the books they need, and the hospital only holds bad news. In a way, also, this film can be considered a commentary on the unfair, unbelievable omnipotence of the superstar in Hindi cinema: he chooses the project, the story, the director, the co-star, and even decides how to shoot the song.

Or maybe Balki's okay with all that. Just like he's okay with taking a clever Rekha cameo that should have been a sly moment and stretching it into a long, wordy, needlessly dramatic scene. That, in essence, is the problem with Shamitabh: it spends all its time explaining its own jokes. And that never sounds right, no matter the voice.

Rating: 1.5 stars

Raja Sen gives it 1.5/5

Ten minutes into Shamitabh, you begin to realize you're feeling something that seems almost alien - entertainment. You'll be glad that, after what seems like eons, we have a mainstream commercial movie with a story that's unique and original, without the tacky underpinnings of the products from the genre. If you're a Big B fan, the first half ofShamitabh is going to be your LSD.

Daanish, a kid from a village, grows up into a perfectly-cast Dhanush, with dreams of being an actor. Daanish moves to Mumbai and stalks whichever filmmaker he spots, and begins living secretly in a vanity van. When he finally gets a chance to do a screen test, he kills it. The only problem? He's mute. But this is 2015, and filmmaking now has tools, like dubbing. With these tools, even a tool can be a hero. And as the protagonist mentions, if you've got the vocal cords of Amitabh Bachchan, even a dog can be star. So when Daanish comes across Amitabh Sinha (Amitabh Bachchan), a washed up drunkard with a glorious baritone, the collaboration reeks of superstardom. Daanish plus Amitabh becomeShamitabh.

Going with the theme of the film, Shamitabh is half a great movie. This is a film about superstardom, starring superstars. It's about the high of the rise and the constant threat of the fall; the jealousy, the disappointment and all the other emotional baggage that comes with stardom. In one scene,Shamitabh is shooting a movie where his heroine has to visit the loo, so he builds her a toilet out of snow and the commode becomes a romantic theme in the song. Yup, Shamitabh is also an unsubtle commentary of the nature of commercial Bollywood.

The conflict' in director Balki's previous films Cheeni Kum and Paa were ham handed to say the least, but this time we have something imaginative. As Shamitabh becomes a star, his greed starts to eat him inwards. Amitabh, who is kept a secret and presented to the public as a valet named Robert, begins to wonder why he doesn't get the lion's share of the credit. Acting and screen presence is all about the delivery, he growls. To get you high, a bottle of whiskey doesn't need water, but water does need whiskey. Even if a whiskey bottle is 43% whiskey and 57% water. His voice didn't suit the industry in the '80s, so how is it fair that someone with no screen presence becomes a star because of that very same voice? Neither can live without the other. The ego clashes and jealous bickering between the two are fun, as are Amitabh's drunk philosophical putdowns.

However, it seems Balki took the dual nature of his film too seriously because the second half of the film crashes and burns. Balki loses the drive and is unsure of what to do with the characters, so he includes some truly horrendous contrivances to pad things up.

There is also a ton of stupidity in the movie, like the eyeroll-inducing, Finnish sci fi technology behind getting Amitabh's voice in Daanish's throat. Other contrivances include a random assistant director (an awkward Akshara Haasan) who rescues Daanish from being thrown out of Film City for stalking, puts him on a screen test, sends him to Finland, and convinces her director to cast him in his film as the star (twice). Talk about luck by chance. There's also an unintentionally hilarious subplot of a tabloid reporter who realizes the discrepancy in Shamitabh's voice and travels to Finland as an investigative reporter and then blackmails Shamitabh. Not to mention the hundred thousand product placements crammed into nearly every frame of the film.

If you were disappointed by the endings of Paa and Cheeni Kum, prepare to face something similar. During the closing minutes it becomes clear that Balki doesn't know what point to make, so he just abruptly gives up and the credits roll, leaving you with a mixed bag of emotions.

Fortunately you'll still remember the one thing that kept the film going - Bachchan's performance. Such style and elegance is seldom seen in cinema. Even when he's lying in the dirt, blabbering with a sozzled face, Bachchan is a class act. And it's great to see him play a character instead of his own French bearded self. Amitabh points out that he's the larger part of the name Shamitabh, and Big B is pretty much the only significant and memorable part of the film. This might as well have been called ShaMetabh.