Midnight's Children was
directed with a passion that can't be found in the film itself. It's
beautifully choreographed and meticulously told, with large sweeping vistas and
delicate examinations of India 's
culture. It's a technical wonder, filled with a majestic sense of scale and
scope. But that story — ouch.
Characters frequently die, abandon their loved ones, betray their
family members, are exterminated in wars or are left homeless, penniless (or
rupee-less) and destitute. It's so relentlessly depressing, that even the final
coda — where other movies shovel some good news — can barely eek out anything
that resembles a happy ending. Even in the maternity ward at a hospital, that cheery
place with all those fresh humans squeaking and cooing behind baby blankets,
there is a scourge of bad news involving dead mothers and a baby-swapping
maternity nurse.
Midnight's Children,
based on the 1981 Salman Rushdie novel of the same name, is best described as a
mystical Forrest Gump set in India . Where
Forrest Gump shared Dr Peppers with JFK and swiveled his hips with Elvis, these
characters frequently find themselves at crossroad events in India 's tumultuous history, including its roots
in British colonialism, a violent civil war, skirmishes with Pakistan , and India 's 21-month state of martial
law known as Emergency. The movie sent me racing to a history book to see how
and where (and if) the real stories intersected with the movie. (They do.)
The film begins with the main character's grandparents: an Indian
woman and a British doctor with a prominent nose. Remember the nose. The doctor
has an interesting scene where he must diagnose his future wife's illnesses
through a hole cut in a sheet that protects her modesty. First her stomach
appears at the hole, then a leg and, embarrassingly, a breast. "One day
she'll have a headache and I'll see her face," he says. The story then
shifts to their three daughters, whose own lives becomes tangents for other
stories.
Eventually, we meet Saleem, a boy born at the exact moment of
What was really frustrating was how little affection the picture
held for any of its vast field of players. The characters that we can
sympathize with are killed off, and the despicable ones live forever. Even
worse, Saleem (played by three actors at three ages) can't seem to find his
footing within the vast storyline. Forrest Gump skipped inexplicably from event
to event because it was an absurd form of irony; Saleem seems to exist only to
remind us of his suffering. It's a brutal epic, one that frames India as the
world's cultural epicenter, but then wraps it in tragedy and despair, never
triumph.
Rushdie's beloved book might explain some of these issues, but as
it stands here the film needs some help putting all the pieces together. It
pains me to write that, because director Deepa Mehta's directing is quite
wonderful. Her eye for detail and observation are stunning, and the little bits
of the film — ants on a leaf, a man rowing a boat, a boy gazing at the ceiling,
a train dashing through an Indian village — are my favorite pieces of Midnight's Children.
These scenes show us the humanity of a magical land.
Unfortunately, they do nothing to help us with this magic-less movie.
