Readers Write In #842: Are we drinking sand in Tamil Cinema?

By Srinath Lalgudi

There is this scene in the movie The American President, a lesser popular work by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (it was kind of a dress rehearsal before his immensely better and popular `The West Wing` TV show) where the thirst for leadership is discussed between the President and a member of his staff. Please see the clip below before reading on.

I completely acknowledge(and apologize for any inadvertent triggering) this might seem like I am possibly raising a political issue where it does not belong and there is definitely a whole other topic of discussion for another blog or post regarding our current world leaders and how we are as world citizens, but please painstakingly sidestep it and stay with me. 

I have always seen this as a concept that applies to the general human thirst for experiencing something genuine that can soothe our senses, our thirst for elevated forms of artwork, discourse, music, food and last but not the least – movies. I would like to re-phrase these lines for my purposes-

“They want good cinema. They’re so thirsty for it they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage of it, and when they discover there’s no water, they’ll drink the sand.”

“People don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty. They drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.”

Have we reached this stage? This is not just about liking or not liking a movie, but more about how we are judging a piece of content and choosing to absorb it.

Has Tamil cinema and its premium creators broken us? Have we been hurt so much that we are willing to accept glimmers of an attempt from a loved creator and wilfully ignore gargantuan issues as we don’t know if it can ever get better or because it makes us feel less cheated ? This was an undercurrent thought stream in my head as I was watching Coolie.

Sorry if anyone found the above preamble boring but I couldn’t stop asking myself these questions since I saw the movie & read/saw all the polarizing reviews and this was my way of perhaps bringing y’all into my state of mind.

As is apparent now I suppose, Coolie was a huge disappointment for me (lesser than it could have been only because Thug Life really grounded me this year and Leo’s second half had shaken my faith in LK’s writing more than I would like to admit). It disappointed me not just in terms of a cinematic experience but also as a creative endeavor from a film-maker who we believe has the chops to make a masala entertainer that is sensible – logically or emotionally or both. I felt a lot of the script was cobbled together for convenience, a lot of the cast was ineffectively used and with so many questionable writing decisions that I find it hard to believe it passed muster as multiple LK ADs repeatedly read it. Let me enumerate some of the points that ticked me off the most-

1. The Electric Chair – I know BR in his review says that LK’s crime angles are MacGuffins but I strongly disagree. A MacGuffin is something that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself (say the briefcase in one of LK’s favorite directors’s Pulp fiction) and we rarely know more details about it which makes it easier to overlook. But LK in almost all his movies spends quite a bit of time trying to show us and sometimes giving us an information dump to a fault about how particular crimes are being perpetrated. E.g: The whole drug syndicate in Kaithi and continued at various points in Vikram; Bhavani’s introduction prologue in Master; the kidnapping subplot in Maanagaram; The early part of the infamous Leo flashback. 

Even Coolie starts with a voiceover just telling us the what and who of the port mafia but I can somewhat forgive that as the electric chair aka instant crematorium is the plot point that gets our story going. For me this could/should have been a MacGuffin where there would have been as little info as possible, just a secret technology that can dispose of bodies in an instant and nothing more. But no, instead the device gets a detailed backstory that even characters are not afforded in this film. Now once you do that you have to make an effort to be sensible logically/visually where the science has to be made to look believable or fantastic but the writing here is the farthest thing from it. If you are contending that the port mafia prefers this device over the whole friggin ocean as a way to dispose of human remains, where is the writing to back that up. You cannot say Nolan inspires you visually as you depict the machine’s operation but not do an iota of research when compared writing wise. Should we just drink this sand?

1. The Resurrection – BR loved the `out-of-nowhere accomplice` for Dayal which I can agree worked like a good twisty callback to Agent Tina but I am sorry, I cannot also criminally ignore the `out-of-nowhere resurrection` of Dayal that starts a whole other plot point. It appears it was decided Dayal needed to appear dead and then burst out of his shallow grave(a Beatrix Kiddo homage I presume) but where is the writing to support that? Just looking up Lazarus Syndrome on Wikipedia, having a character instantly spout it as if it is normal occurrence is enough and that counts as smart writing now that we should just settle for? If you did want to show this syndrome, where is the research needed to make the audience buy into it and into Dayal being one of the rare people who displays this phenomenon. Shankar (who I have a much lesser expectation of scientific logic from) showed our intelligence lesser disrespect when he tried to explain Sivaji’s resurrection using Defibrillation. Should we just drink this sand?

1. The “Lost” Daughter – BR asked for a bigger emotional arc for Preethi, I think LK realized he needed it too and his grand solution for it was making her Deva’s daughter with absolutely no emotional foundation whatsoever. Compare this with how much the daughter element is built up in Kaithi or the son/grandson element is built up in Vikram – I am not saying they are perfect but it is to illustrate that LK knows it is needed but decided not to invest in it here. One random line from Charlie is all we have to settle for in this to give our emotional buy-in as it is milked within minutes for manufacturing almost fake emotional stakes to a viewer? Should we just drink this sand?

1. Deva’s Coolie 90s flashback – BR really liked Deva’s single shot close-up narration as it reminded him of Dilli’s story in Kaithi, but I think he might have missed out on why the latter struck such a chord. All we get is Karthi’s solid performance and a background score that makes our imagination do the remaining work and allows us to emotionally buy into Dilli’s plight. In this case, you have been hinting at the shot-on-real-film style de-aged flashback throughout the movie to that point,even showing a young Rajashekar and face-less Deva so no matter how good Rajini performs how can that work now since all we are waiting for is to see how good the de-aged Rajini looks? More importantly, in Kaithi, not showing us a flashback keeps us in the present moment and keeps the tension of the chase of the lorry intact, but in Coolie no matter how you slice it, the present predicament is less interesting that the past flashback. It is ultra obvious, Deva is gonna eventually kill Simon. What we want is to SEE what Deva did when he was the titular Coolie because you have built that up so much. You mean for that flashback to have an impact on teens Simon and Dahaa’s lives and psyches where the latter decides to hire Deva in the end instead of just executing him, shouldn’t more time have been invested in showing us that backstory? Either you commit to the de-aged Rajini VFX come what may and hope the audience comes with you or you make us more interested in the present where aged Deva gets out of this bind. What we get is half-baked on both ends, at best. Should we just drink this sand? 

I can go on and on but beyond writing, I felt even the casting was off-key. Other than Deva and Dayal (I am so glad Soubin played this role instead of Fafa, it was much more fresher and added the necessary grimey-ness needed for this character, though even he was betrayed halfway as he morphs into a weird terminator like cockroach villain), no other cast-character was fleshed out well. 

Even if you assume the movie characters don’t change, I feel I could see Sathyaraj fitting in better into the roles of Simon, Kaleesha or even Dayal if you tried, drawing amplely from his ‘yennama kanna, sowkiyama’ cooleth attitude. If you wanted to take advantage of his ‘Kattappa’ loyalty vibe, why not spend some scenes showing the friendship between Deva-Rajashekar ? 

Wouldn’t it be easier to see Upendra with his brainy director/writer/actor/star persona in real life being a much more believable scientist/best friend to Rajini than Sathyaraj?

You decide to also have a ‘Rolex’ in this movie, I assume the tonality that BR mentioned was decided upon after Aamir came into the fold. Are we ready to settle for being unexpected for the sake of it, even if the tone does not match the writing? Rolex was hinted as being a more ruthless baddie then Sandhanam so when we see his scene and the tone, we also feel why the other villains feared him. Here, Dahaa is hinted as being the same way but where does the tone of his eventual reveal match it? Huskies from a helicopter? Arm tattoos and forgetting to remove the safety from his automatic weapons? The only thing missing was a punch dialogue `Dahaa khush hua!”. Now after establishing such a middling un-serious tone, we are supposed to accept Dahaa is this omnipotent Syndicate’s head and also see him remember Deva killing his dad’s partner for smuggling and killing coolies (when Simon whose dad was actually killed plot conveniently forgets Deva, until it is too late) and offering him a job in his own “smuggling” operation doing what? Dog grooming? I need to settle for this level of writing from LK, as he treated Rajini with dignity and as you know we as tamil cinema fans can only have one or the other? We are greedy otherwise. Should we just drink this sand?

Simply put, NO! I don’t want to drink the sand and we all should not want to either. I want to keep looking for water and if that means being fooled by more mirages, so be it. I want to keep holding filmmakers to better standards and not give them consolation prizes. I concede that what we think about a film is a matter of opinion but whether it is water or sand cannot be a matter of opinion. We all drink sand some time or the other and even like it but let’s accept what it is and not call it water.

I am not discounting the filmmaker’s hard work towards making any movie along with the practical considerations due to the market, the star, the hitting-the-iron-when-you-are-hot, the this-opportunity-may-never-come-again circumstances but at the same time you do not get a free pass or repeated mulligans. I am not saying it is easy because if it were we would all do it but I refuse to be satisfied by the 15 things that were done right when 85 things went wrong. No matter how frustrating it is, we need to keep a high bar for our creators who have shown us they are capable of doing so much better and call them out when they do not reach that bar. Water is water and sand is sand.

I know my words may come off sounding supercilious and sanctimonious but I assure you that is not where I come from. I am just so tired and so disappointed that I am afraid I will succumb to drinking sand and thinking its water. I wanted to write my thoughts down to make sure they stay alive within me under all the frustration and if I am lucky, just perhaps, cause some similar flaring thought embers in those who read this lament.