This isn’t the usual screenplay woven around a single protagonist. It takes scenic detours and gives everyone their own arc.
Spoilers ahead…
You can read the full review on Film Companion, here: https://www.filmcompanion.in/vaanam-kottattum-movie-review-sarath-kumar-makes-a-solid-comeback-in-a-well-acted-drama/
Dhana’s first film, Padaiveeran, was about a village wastrel who becomes a cop, but then discovers — to his dismay — that he has to stop the caste-based violence unleashed by members of his own family. The film ended with a strong message, but it had little else. Vaanam Kottattum, the director’s follow-up, is, in the end, a “message movie”, too — but this time, the (small) sermon is built up to. In fact, for the longest time, the screenplay (by Dhana and Mani Ratnam), makes you wonder where it is headed and what its focus is. I mean this in a good way, because most of the stories we see are woven around a single protagonist and most of the time, we know what turns his trajectory will take. (It’s almost always a “he”.) But for one, Vaanam Kottattum doesn’t even have a protagonist.
Continued at the link above.
Copyright ©2020 Film Companion.
Baradwaj Rangan 
steadymeandering
February 8, 2020
The movie didn’t work for me at all. Everything felt artificial and sid Sriram’s movie way soooo not in sync with the movie. It was so distracting it actually became a joke. And the villain was like just a huge parody. Can not believe the director such a talented cast on such an underwhelming screenplay. Too many moving parts so nothing felt complete. The love arcs were stunted to say the least . But great performances from the likable cast
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brangan
February 8, 2020
steadymeandering: I am SO not a fan of mainstream filmmakers – Mani Ratnam, Vetri Maaran, a few more — getting songs and then using them mostly for the background of scenes.
Songs are living, breathing entities — and also on a larger-than-life plane than the ‘regular’ film. So unless your scene is ITSELF on a heightened plane — a classic example being a blind man driving car to a song in the backgroud in PSYCHO — I feel a score is better than a song.
I felt the same thing in CCV. Every time “Bhoomi bhoomi” came in the background, behind a scene, I was yanked out of the scene.
I felt the same thing in ASURAN, when you get a small bit of “Ellu vaaya” is used and the scene (and its emotion) begins to get heightened, and then the song gets chopped off. Why not simply use a score to underline Dhanush’s emotion?
Either use songs only for promotion and not IN the movie. (Unless you are actually shooting a full-fledged song sequence.)
Or make instrumental versions of these songs and use them behind scenes.
Maybe there are a few other ways.
But using bits of the song itself behind a scene — just does not work for me. Becomes a huge distraction.
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steadymeandering
February 8, 2020
@brangan I completely agree. Especially when they are mouthing dialogues and the song in the background is so jarring. Especially the same song over and over again.
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MANK
February 8, 2020
Exactly 27 years ago, Mani had produced Dasarathan with SarathKumar, so i guess this is a reunion of sorts.I believe that Sarath was almost selected to play tamilselvan in Iruvar as well
I am not a fan of Mani Rathnam’s screenwriting. he shouldn’t be writing screenplays for his own films, leave alone anybody else’s. He is a great director and he should stick to that. Mainly, his dialogues sucks. i don’t know how it is in this film. I havent seen it,the trailer doesnt interest me at all
Regarding Sarath as a mass hero, i think he went as far as he could.From Sooryan to sooryavamsham and Nattpukake
There was the looming shadow of Rajnikanth, who had the biggest mass audience, so all these wannabe -mass stars like Sarath, Vijayakanth, and Arjun had a ceiling. Frankly Sarath wasn’t that charismatic and his dialogue delivery had issues.
He was also switching camps repeatedly. he was first backed by Jayalalitha against Rajnikanth. But then Sarath had a tiff with her and he joined the DMK camp and became a friend of Rajni
Both Sarath and Vijayakanth went into politics rather early, while Captain succeeded to an extend, Sarath failed miserably. That distracted him from his career. he also had personal issues. Divorce from his first wife, affair with Naghma, then there was politics in the industry, that made him a bitter rival of Kamal Haasan
In the end, younger guys like Vijay and Ajith came in , and they cornered the mass market.
Off Topic: I think i’ll put this here,
Today is legendary James Dean’s birth anniversary, so i just wrote up a piece on the Dean persona and his final film Giant. for those who are interested
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brangan
February 8, 2020
MANK: Just out of curiosity, have you never liked Mani Ratnam’s screenwriting, or do you have a problem only with his post-IRUVAR style?
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sai16vicky
February 8, 2020
@MANK: I think dialogues for most of this latter-day movies were written by Suhasini (esp. Iruvar). So, I can see your problem there; I have had issues with the way writes climaxes but apart from that, he writes pretty solid screenplays. I am sucker for the way he writes romances (with zingers and all that). But even if you take serious stuff like ‘Chatriyan’, it has some great bits of writing.
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vijay
February 8, 2020
Problem with Mani’s dialogue is nobody talks like that in real life. Kannaththil muthamittaal wasn’t bad maybe because Sujatha took care of that department. Otherwise, both before and after his dialogue leave a lot to be desired. Another one of his weird traits is to have actresses who cant speak Tamil properly dub with an accented tamil. In CCV there is a ridiculous line by Diana “in chaste Tamil made even more ridiculous by the accent
GVM has a lot of these same issues but those are in a different league altogether
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H. Prasanna
February 8, 2020
I agree with MANKi baat on Sarath Kumar stardom. He went as far as anyone of his calibre could have. He/director is just exploring the another side to his masculinity in this second innings like Rajkiran, and you cannot give retrospective effect for how you feel about him now.
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MANK
February 9, 2020
Boss, i have always found his dialogues irritating, but it was tolerable earlier.
The staccato rhythms works some times,but most of the times it seems inconsistent with the character and takes you out of the movie
But starting with Raavanan, it has been intolerable. The dialogues in Kattru velliyadai are some of the worst i have ever heard
His film making has always been extraordinary, and that used to smooth out the irritating dialogues, but recently that’s not the case. As you said somewhere , KV has some of Mani’s best filmmaking in recent times, but nothing registers, because the screenplay and characterization are so muddled. The acting is bad , or rather the actors are badly directed and and dialogues are terrible.
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MANK
February 9, 2020
Ii think Mounaragam, agninachatiram, Thalapathi ,Iruvar and Kanathil Muthamittal are Mani’s best screenplays.
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Sneha Kannan
February 9, 2020
The film didn’t work for me for a number of reasons. I couldn’t find the depth to the characters, there was a clear tone set for each character but wished there was some more time given to the characters and their relationships, like what’s up with Shantanu and Aishwarya togetherness? They were shown in a couple of scenes together, but I wish there was more about them. I wish I could have seen more about Vikram Prabhu and Madonna’s relationship. What was the whole deal with Amitav and Aishwarya’s first time meet? I mean, that was extremely unbelievable. They meet for the first time and HOW is it possible that they just hide behind a well fearing Vikram Prabhu? Sure, everything can’t be shown but I wanted to see more about people and their emotions.
Also, WHAT IS UP WITH THE SONGS? Not a single song was shown fully, I’ve had the En Uyir Kaatre on loop since it’s release but was so disappointed to not see that on screen at all. I was not entirely convinced by the background music score, it seemed like a mismatch. Had so many expectations of this movie but this was a big let down. While I could appreciate the many protagonists part, I was only convinced by Radhika and Sarath Kumar and his brother’s parts. Surely wanted to see a better screenplay
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Madan
February 9, 2020
Off topic but any plans to review Shikara?
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N Madhusudhan
February 9, 2020
Watching Vaanam Kottatum made me wonder where was this solid performer in Sarath Kumar hidden all these years. His chemistry with Radhika was endearing that made for the film’s best scenes.
I found this film to be a bunch of very interesting and effective bits that finally didn’t add up to much. That’s a disappointment because the entire cast is in such good form. The hasty ending was quite underwhelming and spoiled the whole film for me. There was a lot of promise and it ended in such a ridiculous fashion. Its hard to understand what was the extent of Mani Ratnam’s involvement in the writing but the climax gave a feeling that he abandoned this one to quickly start shooting Ponniyin Selvan.
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N Madhusudhan
February 9, 2020
The freshness in the screenplay and the performances had “Mani Ratnam” written all over it but the climax was such a letdown. Although I still feel he’s one of the best writers in Tamil cinema.
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Enigma
February 10, 2020
I agree with some of the comments here. The dialogues in Mani Ratnam’s films are so awkward and cringe worthy that watching the film becomes unbearable. Surprisingly the conversations in his earlier films (Mounaragam and Agni Natchatiram) are so good and (mostly) natural, it is after Roja that he regressed in that department. I always wondered why he couldn’t hire someone to write the dialogues. Whenever he did so – Alaipyuthey, Kannathil, Guru (probably because it was in Hindi) – the movies became so much more bearable.
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brangan
February 10, 2020
Madan: Trying to see if I can catch SHIKARA… I leave for Berlin next week and with the number of things on my plate, I think I’ll have time for one Hindi film review, and there’s a new Imtiaz Ali coming up 🙂 But yes, I do want to see this one and talk about it…
N Madhusudhan: “The freshness in the screenplay…”
I’m glad someone said that. Yes, the villain track at the end doesn’t work because it seems to belong in another film – but even there, I loved how one brother wasn’t even interested in revenge and how the other brother wanted revenge only because he’s not sane.
But that’s characterisation — and again, coming back to the screenplay, there are so many distinct threads and I really was fascinated by how unconventionally they were handled. You keep thinking there’s going to be a Vikram-Madonna ILU moment soon and that the whole “father IT raid” is just a lead-up to that. But that turns out to be HER own screenplay thread, in which Vikram is just a small part — and slowly begins to play a bigger part.
I wish they had taken this all the way through, with a few more rewrites. This would have been a landmark movie. Instead, now, it’s more an “interesting” one, with some tracks that really work and some (romance, etc.) that really don’t.
PS: I wonder how anyone can include a chair-levitating moment in such a movie. Is that because they suddenly think “I need a mass scene”? Don’t they see that they have already made SUCH a non-mass movie, and that one supposed mass moment doesn’t belong here and makes the film suddenly look ridiculous?
PPS: I wish I had rewritten the title of this review. I think it comes off as a ringing endorsement, whereas the actual review is more along the lines of what I felt. That’s the whole problem with these ASAP reviews…
PPPS: Still, after a really long time, as I told a colleague, I was happy with both the flow and the analysis in a review. It was a tough film to write about – because at first, the “long screenplay threads” technique doesn’t immediately register. But when I re-read this a day later, I was quite pleased I was able to talk about it coherently (at least for me 😀 )
Doesn’t happen all that often.
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Sneha Kannan
February 10, 2020
So. There’s still something I do not understand about the way directors use music in their movies. I was (still am) heavily invested in the songs in this movie, loved the lyrics, music and am unable to fathom as to why they were just not used to their potential (the way I saw it). If the idea was not to use any song completely in the movie, why make an album with all the songs? Why not just use music just for the purpose of background score, like the way they released the original background score for Vinnai Thaandi. I understand it’s all relative (that that director etc.) but there HAS to be a reasoning and I don’t get it.
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N Madhusudhan
February 10, 2020
“I wonder how anyone can include a chair-levitating moment in such a movie. Is that because they suddenly think “I need a mass scene”? Don’t they see that they have already made SUCH a non-mass movie, and that one supposed mass moment doesn’t belong here and makes the film suddenly look ridiculous?”
Honestly. I don’t understand what they smoke when they write these scenes. This issue of unnecessary massification of non-mass films has plagued our films for a long time. I can understand if it’s a Dhanush film where the justification usually is market demand. Why did they have end this film with that scene when the rest of the film seems to be so well thought out and written? Also, the idea of having the villain play dual characters seemed to be because the evil one could pull a fast one on Vikram Prabhu at the end. I was expecting something better to come out of it.
Reminds me of vadivelu’s dialogue from Winner – opening ellam nalla than irukku..aana unkitte finishing seri illiye pa…
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Tommy
February 11, 2020
Some of the dialogues in Iruvar works (the exchanges between Selvam and Anandan in early scenes) and the rest are downright terrible. The lines spoken by Aishwarya, Revathy, Gowthami, and Tabu fall flat and don’t add anything to the screenplay or characterization. The same goes for Nasser and the rest of the supporting cast.
I believe Suhasini was ill-equipped to do justice to the periodic setting and power dynamics of the screenplay. Sujatha would have taken it to a different league in terms of writing. The way he used zingers in dialogue to convey emotions and authenticity is unparalleled. It is evident from that the quality of writing in Mani Rathnam and Shankar movies deteriorated post his demise. As much as I admire Jeyamohan for his literary achievements, he is no Sujatha when it comes to film writing.
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Enigma
February 11, 2020
Hi Brangan, could we have a thread on the Oscars where we can comment on unless you are planning to write a piece.
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w.w.Focuz
March 19, 2020
Since this didn’t have a wide release in Kerala, caught up on Prime Video only this week. My take is that the run-time (under 2 hours) is too short to explore the many threads the story teases us with.
I feel that the transplantation and toil of the mother and the two siblings deserved more attention as does the conflict of an out of touch father and his children who have grown up in an urban milieu.
To somewhat lesser extent, so does the stigma of the elder brother and family left behind in the village, the romantic – or not – tracks of the young, the revenge motive, the struggle of the wealthier George family etc.
IMHO, this would have been perfect as a 6-8 hours long mini series. With the big names and pedigree involved and top notch production values this would have been a no brainer for the streaming services that are at present feeding us with drivel.
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