Stuck at the epiglottis...

Disclaimer: This one is a 'stream of consciousness' sort of post, written immediately after I watched the film; those who have seen My Name is Khan are likely to find it more interesting than those who have not :-)

A few years back, I watched a kid perform at a social evening. His parents kept goading him to dance, and for the longest time, he played coy and fidgeted away. When he finally got going, he seemed to have a genuine rhythm about him and some of his moves were pretty impressive.

Sadly though, long after we’d applauded what we took to be his finale flourish, he kept dancing. After twelve or lucky thirteen times, the same rocking move began to wear a little thin. Finally, his embarrassed parents had to physically remove him, kicking and screaming, from the center of the room.

That kinda sums up My Name is Khan for me.

A film that takes a long time to get to what it has to say, then says it well, but doesn’t know when it’s done.

Let me begin at the beginning. Yes, Mr.Johar, Hindi film audiences are dumb, and need to have several technical things simplified and spelt out; we would never get Asperger’s Syndrome otherwise, but writing to your lover in a journal and then reading it out for the benefit of us stupid viewers is not just overdone as a film device, but when it’s done a-la-Gump, in an Asperger’s Syndromy way, it’s downright annoying.

Zarina Wahab shines as the Ammi, but the rest of the early build up – the two young Shahrukh Khans and their exploits, took too much screen time. Then came the whole set up of the adult Khan wooing Mandira (yet another impossibly bubbly on-screen character for Kajol). That again took forever – Khan’s speech on his brother’s beauty products at the salon where Kajol works, a good symptom of this ailment. Nutshell – this part of the film was the kid in my opening story taking too long to start his jig.

Then came the good parts: once Mandira agreed to marry Khan, the song was good, the honeymoon night exchange was something I believe no Indian actress save Kajol could have pulled off (she is impossibly cute in that scene).

The 911 scenario and the events that follow, including Khan beginning to recite the Quran at a memorial service held for the victims, much to the discomfort of all gathered, were quite good. The alienation of the Muslim community (in particular) and the larger South-East Asian community (in general) were also brought out as well as could be expected from commercial Hindi cinema.

Things went well, up to the point when the couple’s son dies. When Mandira cleans her son’s corpse before the last rites, she slowly goes catatonic and the scene leaves you with a genuine lump in the throat. Lots of paisa-wasool moments during this part of the movie.

Sadly, for the rest of the film, Kajol maintains her catatonic posture and is not too convincing as a mother seeking justice, just shrieking through, with no sign of the blind grief that comes from losing an offspring, the kind of thing that chokes you and bottles you up.

Then there’s the stuff that I believe sounds bad when spoken in dialogue – Mandira claims “she has no time to be Khan’s wife, since she is busy trying to get justice, as mother to a dead son.” For my money, this is what is going on inside her head, the kind of thing that could have been more effectively conveyed through a gesture or an expression, even in a song, rather than having it spelt out through on- screen dialogue. As the film began to run short of raw stock, there were other such moments of desperation from the Screenplay Writer and Director.

The film began to unravel big time with the start of the whole Khan-saves-the-day-during-the-Georgia-hurricane episode.

Bad production design, crappy sets, sad extras, shitty writing, repeated clichés, impossible situations (even by Captain Buffalo standards) were strewn like the false looking corpses on the Karjat puddle-becomes-Georgia-hurricane sets. They must have spent 5-7 minutes of screen time on this, but it was excruciatingly long to watch.

For me, the film ended when he was released from prison after being mistaken for a terrorist, but no, for the Director, the Indian Muslim had to save a dozen black asses, in a selfless act that was aimed to shame the whole Caucasian race.

His martyrdom then had to continue - to his getting stabbed, then saved, and finally, being honoured by a President of the US of A (who my nephew rightly pointed out, looked more like Tiger Woods than Obama).

Almost all the non-Indian actors, except the one police officer who investigates the boy’s murder, were uniformly bad, of a low-budget variety. Scenes that otherwise struck a emotional chord, like the one in the Georgia church (before the hurricane), where Khan remembers his step-son as his best friend, are badly marred at some point by terrible acting; in this instance, when the funny haired black boy begins to sing in supposed catharsis, it looks like he's singing in joy (the director does not seem to know better either)

Shahrukh was impressively in character for most of the film, (the slight squint he holds through the film even causing him a sprained facial nerve in one of the scenes, I’m told). But in the few moments that he forgets Asperger’s Khan, he becomes King Khan (watch him in the Georgia hurricane, running his fingers through his hair, for instance) and that can look very bad indeed.

Kajol, like I said earlier, plays herself, yet another bubbly, (hint of madness), truly-cute-in-moments sort of role. Her good stuff ends with her son’s death.

Having had no intention of going to watch the film, and having gone to accompany a teenage nephew who wears his Shahrukh-fan status proudly, I came back pleasantly surprised that parts of the movie were not just bearable, but bordering on good.

And yet, like the little boy at the beginning of this piece, the film overstayed its welcome. It gave me a lump in the epiglottis area a few times, but I found it difficult to swallow.