Movie Review: Hotel Mumbai (2018)

A recreation of the large-scale 2008 terrorist attacks, Hotel Mumbai portrays selfless bravery amidst unfolding panic and deadly coordinated mayhem.

It's November 2008 and 10 heavily armed and well-trained terrorists, all indoctrinated young men, arrive in Mumbai on an inflatable dinghy. In constant touch with their handlers through cell phones and earpieces, the terrorists split up to attack various predesignated targets.

At the lavish Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, chef Hemant Oberoi (Anupam Kher) and waiter Arjun (Dev Patel) are among the staff members and take pride in providing exceptional service. The guests include the wealthy and recently married Zahra (Nazanin Boniadi) and her American husband David (Armie Hammer), along with their infant son and nanny Sally (Tilda Cobham-Hervey). Vasili (Jason Isaacs) is a tough Russian ex-military type also staying at the hotel.

After killing scores of civilians at a train station terminal and other locations, a subgroup of the terrorists infiltrate the Taj and start randomly killing guests and staff, while seeking out foreigners as hostages. With local authorities outgunned and help slow in arriving, Hemant, Arjun and other staff members have to find ways to shelter and save as many guests as possible.

Based on real events, with chef Oberoi an actual character and the other featured guests and staff members amalgamations of real survivors and victims, Hotel Mumbai is an astounding achievement. Tense, harrowing, gripping and heartbreaking, often all at the same time, the film recreates with unblinking audacity the tragedy of a large-scale terrorist slaughter and conveys what it means to live through an unfolding hell.

With terrorist attacks aiming to inflict maximum damage an all too frequent occurrence around the world, Hotel Mumbai pauses and humanizes the scale and depth of the atrocities. The statistics become husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, infants and nannies, businessmen, backpackers and locals, and life-long employees dedicated to their guests and working to support their families. Each has a story and a life disrupted or terminated by human-inflicted terror.

And director Anthony Maras, who co-wrote the script with John Collee, insists on also defining the attackers and their loss of humanity. They are portrayed as indoctrinated and uneducated young men from rural areas, bewildered by the big city surroundings and fully in the grip of handlers providing continuous reassurance and brainwashing through earpieces. The promise of money to their families is part of the motivation, and Maras takes time amidst the carnage for an attacker to phone home and check on that commitment.

The film does not judge the official local non-readiness to deal with a well-planned attack, allowing the facts to speak for themselves as residents are left to fend for themselves for more than two days while a counter-terrorist force arrives from New Delhi. The brave attempts of a few out-gunned local police officers to provide help are highlighted.

With its numerous victims and relentlessly grim tone Hotel Mumbai is extraordinarily difficult to watch, but also an essential story of a barbarous bloodbath confronted by exceptional courage.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015)

An earnest biography, The Man Who Knew Infinity is a heartfelt tribute to an unlikely mathematical genius.

In Madras, India, early in the 20th century, Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel) is a poor yet modest young man with a natural gift for complex mathematics. Disadvantaged by a lack of advanced education, he eventually finds a job as a lowly accounting clerk and is better able to support his wife Janaki (Devika Bhise). Ramanujan impresses his bosses and they place him in touch with Professor G. H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons) of Trinity College, Cambridge. Hardy arranges for Ramanujan to study at Cambridge so they can publish together.

In England, Hardy finds Ramanujan capable of devising complex mathematical solutions to previously intransigent problems, but lacking the necessary discipline to develop rigorous proofs needed to satisfy academic publications. Nevertheless his works are inspirational, and after a difficult start the two men become friends and inspire each other. But living in a foreign country proves difficult, as does the distance between Ramanujan and his beloved Janaki.

Written and directed by Matthew Brown as an adaptation of the book by Robert Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity is a straightforward story, deriving its power from a friendship between two men from opposite corners of the world with a shared passion for math. The elegant academic milieu of Cambridge around the time of the Great War provides an attractive backdrop.

The contrasts between Hardy and Ramanujan are a large part of the film's appeal. Hardy is a confirmed atheist, and for him math is life's intellectual and emotional obsession, a career that subsumes all else, including caring about other people. For the more instinctive Ramanujan, math is a free-form extension of the spiritual world, his inspiration drawn from a profound relationship with mystic powers.

Finding common ground where Hardy allows Ramanujan the freedom to thrive and the protégé learns to appreciate some level of discipline is at the core of the film, and Brown nurtures the growing bond between the two men to maintain interest.

Unfortunately there is not much more to be offered. Pages and pages of handwritten mathematical formulae do not make for compelling cinema. On rare occasions perfunctory explanations are offered as to why any of the scribbles may matter, but overall Brown has to dance around the edges of the central subject matter, shifting the focus sideways to the people and away from the science.

Equally, Ramanujan's troubles living in England, including incidents of racial abuse, tolerating the cold climate, and adjusting to the foreign cuisine threaten to bog the film down in routine stranger-in-a-strange-land cliches.

Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons carry the film's acting load, both operating within the range prescribed by their characters' societies but releasing the necessary flashes of emotion when grandiose expectations meet harsh realities. Stephen Fry as Ramanujan's boss' boss in Madras and Toby Jones as Hardy's sidekick Professor Littlewood contribute to the supporting cast.

The Man Who Knew Infinity hardly shakes up the biography genre, but does tell its story with a quiet dignity.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: Lion (2016)

A biographical drama, Lion shines the light on the plight of India's lost children, but as a film is limited in scope, intent and impact.

Saroo is a young child from a poor rural family in India. One day he joins his older brother Guddu on a train journey to find work, but the two brothers are accidentally separated at a train station. A disoriented Saroo ends up alone on a decommissioned train that finally stops in Kolkata more than a thousand miles away from his village. After surviving on the streets for a few months, he lands in a government-run shelter, from where he is eventually adopted by Australian couple Sue and John Brierley (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham).

More than 20 years later a grown-up Saroo (Dev Patel) relocates from Tasmania to Melbourne and starts a relationship with fellow student Lucy (Rooney Mara). He develops a strong desire to research and understand his roots, and with the help of Google Earth embarks on a long and difficult search to locate his childhood village.

Directed by Garth Davis and based on the book A Long Way Home co-written by Saroo Brierley, Lion is a well-intentioned effort hampered by over-inflated melodramatics. The story of a lost child is undoubtedly harrowing and carries an emotional punch. But the first part of the film plays out much like a documentary about the perils of child poverty in India, while the second half wallows endlessly in personal despair. At a running time of two hours, the film is stretched well beyond the limits of the material available to build an effective narrative, with both the first and second acts loitering for too long after the point is made.

The film does take a hard look at the tragedy of children lost on the streets of India, and young Saroo's distressing adventures in Kolkata are difficult to watch. There are marauding men scooping up streets kids to unknown fates, women luring young boys into the hands of predators, and the official overcrowded shelter best resembles a derelict prison with rampant exploitation by the guards. The abuses are all implied rather than shown on-screen, but enough is suggested to achieve the objective.

The second half gets bogged down, the lack of forward momentum obvious as director Davis and screenwriter Luke Davies struggle to capture Saroo's internal obsession with tracking his origins. An underdeveloped side-story involving the troubled second boy adopted by the Brierleys becomes a distraction rather than an enhancement, and Saroo's relationships with his mother Sue and girlfriend Lucy are dealt with in tentative snippets.

Dev Patel does his best with the limited material, but is confined to the single tone of internal grief for too long. Nicole Kidman is outstanding in a relatively brief role, and gets a couple of scenes to reveal the rich emotions of a remarkable mother deeply committed to a chosen mission in life.

Lion is reasonably worthwhile as an educational drama, but less successful as a cinematic experience.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

On the Indian version of the hit television quiz show "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?", filmed in a Mumbai studio that is just as slick as any in Hollywood, a young contestant Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) has shocked the nation by reaching the final round: one more correct answer on the next show and he pockets $1Million.

Given that Jamal is nothing but a tea delivery boy at a call centre, and his life started in the slums, Jamal both captures the imagination of the country and the suspicions of the authorities. He is arrested prior to the last show, tortured, and questioned as to how he was able to gain the knowledge needed to correctly answer all the quiz questions. Jamal's answers are the entry point into his life's story, and into Slumdog Millionaire's main narrative.

We witness Jamal's early life in a Bombay slum, right next to an airport runway, including his complex relationship with his elder brother Salim, and his early exposure to religious hatred. Jamal meets Latika, the love of his life, at a young age, but she drifts in and out of his life like an excruciating mirage. A life of petty crime provides an escape out of the slums for Jamal and Salim, but while it's just a passing phase for Jamal, Salim is sucked into the crime underworld for good, setting up tragedies and triumphs for both brothers.

Director Danny Boyle, working with co-director Loveleen Tandan from a script by Simon Beaufoy and Vikas Swarup (based on his novel), delivers a masterpiece. Boyle coaxes excellent performances from a young and relatively inexperienced cast, including several children. Dev Patel as Jamal, Freida Pinto as Latika and Madhur Mittal as Salim deliver memorable characters who are also portrayed as children and young teenagers by other actors, and Boyle captures the essence of each character from an early age.

The cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle reflects India in all its colourful brilliance: from the slums to the highrises, from the glitzy television studio to the shabby police station, and from Mumbai's modern gated homes to the rural trains that are central to Indian life. The film's soundtrack provides a perfect but never overbearing emotional background to Jamal's life.

While Slumdog Millionaire is a story of a young man's rise from poverty, it is also the story of India's economic rise in the past 30 years. Jamal perfectly represents his country, rising from the slums and the edge of starvation to within reach of financial success in a few short years, overcoming internal and external obstacles along the way, using a combination of skill, luck, street smarts, outside help, and instinct. The challenges that he faces are sometimes self-created, and at other times imposed by external forces; as are the solutions that he uses to survive and thrive.

The film provides hints along the way that this is more a metaphor for a country than the story of one man. The issue of destiny is brought up right at the start of the movie, and later in a brilliant dialogue exchange, the police inspector demands to know how Jamal ever got to hold a $100 bill: "Tell me about the $100", he demands. "Bombay became Mumbai", is Jamal's cutting answer. Jamal and Salim also take a symbolic time-out to look down onto the slums of their childhood from the top a modern high-rise under construction.

The host of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?", Prem Kumar (played with just the right amount of sleaze by Anil Kapoor), is a perfect embodiment of outside powers providing both the tantalizing opportunities and tricky obstacles in the way of success. The brief insight into Kumar's own backstory leaves no doubt as to which outside power he represents.

Slumdog Millionaire works on all levels, providing entertainment, drama, romance, humour, and a deeply thoughtful reflection on a country going through a dramatic transition.