Spoilers ahead…
The Macbeth quote, a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, could have been coined for Karan Malhotra’s cinema. As with his earlier Agneepath, his new film Brothers is immaculately mounted – some of the frames could be hung in the living room of the Dil Dhadakne Do family. But there’s a big hollow at the centre. We don’t feel that the things the characters do come from deep inside – their motivation is simply “the screenplay told me so.” Take Gary Fernandes (Jackie Shroff). When we first see him, he’s in prison. His back is towards us, and he seems to be chipping away at a wall. Then the camera pulls back and we see it’s a giant cross. It’s a breathtakingly operatic reveal, but nowhere in the film do we see what religion means to Gary. Yes, he’s got crucifix tattoos all over him, and he’s seen walking in and out of church – but all this tells us is: “he’s religious.” But surely that Gothic prison shot demands more of a payoff. It’s like showing the Niagara Falls to suggest the man likes to take a shower.
This bigness is everywhere – but it’s only on the surface. Brothers is a remake of the Hollywood drama Warrior, which I haven’t seen, but the film also reminded me of the Deol-family boxing movie Apne – only, the “sport” in this case is mixed martial arts (MMA). As in Apne, Brothers deals with a sportsman-father and his two sons – a distant older one (Akshay Kumar’s David) and a puppyish, eager-to-please younger one (Sidharth Malhotra’s Monty) – but the older film led us into the head of the father. He was a silver medallist at the Olympics, but he lost it all when framed under doping charges. So he drives his sons to fulfil his unrealised dreams. Gary has none of that specificity, that prickliness. He’s a collection of character traits – a drunk, an adulterer, a remorse-filled lost soul – that never cohere into a character. We’re given a number of reasons to care for Gary, but those reasons remain in the head – they never enter the heart.
I think the problem is Malhotra’s tendency to aestheticise suffering. He’s part of a small group in Bollywood that includes Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Mohit Suri – the scale may vary in their productions, but what unites them is their commitment to melodrama as a genre and not just a setting in the film’s emotion-meter. They’re “old-fashioned” filmmakers, in a way – and I mean this as a compliment. You find in Brothers things you don’t usually see in Hindi cinema anymore – like the “symbolism” in the scene where Gary visits David and things go horribly wrong, and Gary’s disappointment is scrunched into a shot of his shoes trampling over the flowers he brought along for the occasion. Younger viewers may roll their eyes and laugh, but this red-flag-waving fearlessness in the face of sentimentality is the very essence of the older arts like the opera (and older Indian cinema). The flower-crunching moment itself isn’t wrong, but Malhotra’s lingering on it is. He’s a slo-mo filmmaker. He wants to draw our attention to his aesthetics, but melodrama means you also have to rub the audience’s face in the mud. He’s too classy for that.
None of the big emotions work. When Gary gets out of prison, Monty is an aspiring fighter. He’s got the basics, but something’s lacking – he needs to channelize his anger. But all we see is sullenness. This may be partly due to Sidharth Malhotra’s performance – his idea of acting is to mimic a very good-looking deer caught in the headlights. But instead of showing us Monty’s gradual transformation, we slip into gauzy flashbacks (Jackie looks like a dissolute rock star in these portions) that tell us why this anger came to be. Like everything else in the film, it all makes sense if we connect the dots in our head, but we feel nothing – and what’s melodrama without feeling? Scenes that should make us weep – the one where Gary sets eyes on his granddaughter for the first time; the one where Gary prays for David’s success in the MMA tournament, despite being on Monty’s side (both brothers are participants) – leave us dry-eyed. What a waste of a handkerchief.
Malhotra tries to frame this brother-versus-brother conflict in terms of the Mahabharata, but that, again, is just bigness for the sake of bigness. If you really want to invoke the epic, you make something like Deewar, which isn’t just about brother versus brother, but about a brother on the side of Good versus a brother on the other side. There’s another hitch – the friction between this Hindu epic and the film’s explicitly Christian background. It’s like the dissonance between the chaste poetry in the songs (Sapna jahan dastak na de, or Sooraj tera gardish mein hai) and the casual dialogues. (Gary, upon release from prison: David nahin aaya? Monty: Main aaya kaafi nahin tere ko?) These little things matter. We’re not immersed in a world as fully realised as the ones in, say, Julie or Bobby. Even the freeze-frame end looks like a splice-in from some other film, a less sentimental one.
One feels a twinge about picking on a movie made with so much craft and care, by a director who errs on the side of too much in the midst of many who do too little, but strip away the pretty wallpaper and you’ll see how generic Brothers is – with a generic mother (Shefali Shah, who weeps wonderfully), a generic wife (Jacqueline Fernandez), and a gobsmackingly generic item number by Kareena Kapoor. Even the opponents in the MMA rounds are generic – beefy caricatures bearing names like The Great Luca, which sounds like a villain from an unfinished Subhash Ghai screenplay from the 1980s. But despite some dreadful commentary from Raj Zutshi, the tournament portions work. The fights are tightly shot and edited, and the action is convincingly choreographed. And Akshay Kumar keeps us watching. He’s physically right, of course, but even as an actor, he brings to mind the down-on-their-luck protagonists of dime-store novels like A Stone For Danny Fisher, whose plot outline has a lot in common with this story. His final fight carries the kind of emotional charge the rest of the film should have had. At last, that handkerchief saw some use.
KEY:
- Agneepath= see here
- Dil Dhadakne Do = see here
- Warrior = see here
- Apne = see here
- A Stone For Danny Fisher = see here
Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.
Baradwaj Rangan 
venkatesh
August 21, 2015
The original except for Tom Hardy ‘s performance was not really that much either.
There is as always a great Korean movie that is the original ‘ original’ for this.
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MANK
August 21, 2015
Siddarth malhothra as a fighter? What the hell were they thinking. Just because he comes at a discount as he is KJs protégée
Venkatesh, it’s always the bad Hollywood movies that they remake these days, eg: Bang bang.
Not that Hollywood remakes any better. Look at what spike Lee did to oldboy.
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tonks
August 21, 2015
“his idea of acting is to mimic a very good-looking deer caught in the headlights.”
Hilarious, almost Wodehousean simile
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Vikram Sonni
August 21, 2015
BR…. that crack about sid malhotra’s idea of acting.. Priceless
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brangan
August 21, 2015
venkatesh: What’s the Korean original?
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SG
August 22, 2015
Wow, ‘A Stone for Danny Fisher’. Hearing that name after a long time. Early Harold Robbins was pretty good.
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ansu9843
August 22, 2015
This movie ‘Brothers’ was so melodramatic that it becomes neutral. There was not even a single moment of Good old drama. Siddarth needs to work on his diction. Comparing it with Mahabharatha by maker is most funny.
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brangan
August 22, 2015
SG: A fan? 🙂 I really like his early books. Most people are surprised because they associate him with the porny ones he wrote later, but the early ones had a nice low-key noir/B-movie vibe to them.
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KayKay
August 22, 2015
Sorry Venkatesh, respectfully disagree. I loved Warrior. Yes, it was a family melodrama wrapped up in an MMA flick trapping. But the juxtaposition of Joel Edgerton’s calm against Tom Hardy’s ferociousness gave the climactic bout tremendous urgency (OK the choreography was mediocre but this was a drama that happened to feature martial arts, and not the other way round).
Yeah, the fact that the final match features 2 skilled fighters who also happened to be brothers could have been easily plucked out of a Bollywood screenplay but the performances knock it several notches above it’s dog-eared origins.
It was kinda, sorta like Rocky, if Rocky and Creed were brothers and the grizzled Mickey was their recovering alcoholic and absentee father. That scene where Nick Nolte suffers a relapse and Hardy holds him in the hotel room….that’s one of those scenes that tell you Warrior’s punching above it’s weight category.
As for this remake…..hmmmm…. pass. I rarely watch remakes when I love the original (still smarting from the Robocop and Total Recall Remake debacles, and the reason why Papanasam remains unwatched)
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KayKay
August 22, 2015
‘It’s a breathtakingly operatic reveal, but nowhere in the film do we see what religion means to Gary. Yes, he’s got crucifix tattoos all over him, and he’s seen walking in and out of church – but all this tells us is: “he’s religious.”
Yeah and that’s the problem with some of these movies, isn’t it? There’s no sense of context as to what exactly are you trying to do when you show something like this. This tells me the director probably watched Scorcese’s Cape Fear remake, found the scene with De Niro in his cell tattooed all over with religious iconography, thought it would look cool in a shot and decided to use it.
In Cape Fear my reading of that scene was De Niro’s embracing of religion (most likely already a part of his Southern upbringing) gave some much needed fuel to his pre-existing psychotic rage to get even. For him it was not just about revenge against an injustice perpetrated on him, but a Righteous Crusade to Punish a Wrong.
Case in point. This is how a God uses Tomoyasu Hotei’s menacing instrumental “Battle Without Honor or Humanity”
This, on the other hand is how a freaking Insect would use it:
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tonks
August 22, 2015
The porn bits probably take away the attention from the fact that Harold Robbins (and early Sidney Sheldon, for that matter) were such masterly story tellers. They had the ability to make you live their characters.
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SG
August 22, 2015
BR: Yep 🙂 It is a shame that his name is mostly associated with his later works. I read somewhere that his agents locked him in a room and forced him to write during the later years. My favourites were the trilogy about movie industry ending with the emergence of TV channels (The Dream Merchants, The Carpetbaggers, The Inheritors), Memories of another day, The Betsy and Descent from Xanadu.
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