REVIEW 387: MOTHER’S DAY

Release date:	April 29, 2016
Director:	Garry Marshall
Cast: Language:	Jennifer Aniston, Julia Roberts, Kate Hudson, Jason Sudeikis, Timothy Olyphant, Shay Mitchell, Britt Robertson, Jack Whitehall, Sarah Chalke, Margo Martindale, Hector Elizondo, Aasif Mandvi, Robert Pine English

The things star power can persuade us to do. This weekend, the combined allure of Julia Roberts, Jennifer Aniston and Kate Hudson drew me to a theatre on a maniacally busy, I-don’t-have-time-to-breathe sort of day to watch Garry Marshall’s Mother’s Day.

It is not that the film held out the promise of being another Pretty Woman, Marshall’s career-defining 1990 film that made Roberts a household name. It did not. Mother’s Day is in the same league as the director’s Valentine’s Day (2010) and New Year’s Eve (2011), with an all-star ensemble cast and multi-strand format.

With three female leads, one male lead and a couple at the centre of the action, Mother’s Day is less crowded than those other two films. The quality, however, is many steps down, which says a lot considering that V-Day and NYE were just timepass fare. Hopefully this brings to a close the director’s fixation on festival-related relationship sagas. God, please make him stop at a trilogy. A quartet will be beyond endurance.

Aniston here plays interior designer Sandy, a middle-aged, divorced mother of two young boys, who gets along well with her ex-husband Henry (Timothy Olyphant). Her travails in the film revolve around Henry’s unexpected announcement that he has married the young-enough-to-be-his-daughter Tina (Shay Mitchell from TV’s Pretty Little Liars).

Sandy’s friend Jesse (Hudson) and her sister Gabi (Sarah Chalke, familiar again to Indian viewers primarily from TV’s Scrubs) are having relationship troubles of their own. Both are keeping crucial secrets from their overbearing, prejudiced parents.

Meanwhile, Sandy bumps into a fitness trainer called Bradley (Jason Sudeikis). He is a widower with two daughters and is still pining for his wife (Jennifer Garner) who passed away an entire year back, so you know from 10 miles away where that thread is headed.

On the professional front, Sandy is sought out for a design project by Lance Wallace (Hector Elizondo), agent of the hugely successful writer-entrepreneur Miranda (Roberts).

Elsewhere in the same town, as Mother’s Day approaches, Jesse’s friend Kristin (Britt Robertson) is hesitant to marry the father of her baby, her comedian boyfriend Zack (Jack Whitehall), for reasons yet undisclosed, although she is very much in love with him.

Mother’s Day is clearly intended as a light-hearted yet emotional look at womanhood, motherhood and parenthood in general as the day commemorating maternity approaches. Its Achilles heel is its other obvious intention: to manipulate us by any means available.

To be fair, the film is harmless fun in the first half even when it is not being particularly original. Besides, Aniston, Hudson, Roberts and Sudeikis are so likeable that it is near-impossible not to succumb to their appeal, even if Roberts is given surprisingly little to do in comparison with the others and her body looks impossibly padded up to make her look older for reasons that will become evident when you see the film.

But as the second half rolls along, Mother’s Day gets mushier and progressively more emotionally calculated, till it feels as though Marshall is not aiming at even an iota of depth. Perhaps he feels secure in the knowledge that audiences are easily pleased when so much charisma and beauty are on display. Perhaps, like generations of Hindi filmmakers, he feels the mere mention of Maaaaa is enough to reduce us to messy puddles of tears.

He is right up to a point (I confess). But even a schmaltzy-pretty combine can go only so far when the writing is so lazy and so transparent in its effort to pull at the heartstrings.

The bottom-of the-barrel moment of maudlin manipulativeness comes towards the end when Zack goes on stage with his baby in his arms during a comedy contest, delivers just one funny line in his entire routine, yet wins, no doubt on the strength of the kid’s cuteness alone. Apparently, his audience is as easily pleased as the one Marshall is targeting with Mother’s Day.

The shameless mushiness leads to an unintentionally amusing moment at one point when the baby’s Mummy, Kristin, confides in Jesse that she was given up for adoption by her birth mother. “I have abandonment issues,” she says in a weepy voice that is unwittingly hilarious.

While parts of the film are purportedly liberal, Roberts’ character Miranda uses the word “career” as if it means “that thing women do to fill up an emotional void” or “the thing that leaves women with no time to have romantic relationships and children”. She says it twice in a tone that suggests these implications are obvious.

Mother’s Day is silly. It is a measure of the cast’s collective charm that the film is not entirely unbearable.

Rating (out of five): *1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time: MPAA Rating (US):	119 minutes  PG-13 (for language and some suggestive material)
Release date in US:	April 29, 2016

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day_(2016_film)

  

REVIEW 261: MILLION DOLLAR ARM

Release date:	May 9, 2014
Director:	Craig Gillespie
Cast: Language:	Jon Hamm, Suraj Sharma, Madhur Mittal, Pitobash, Lake Bell, Aasif Mandvi, Bill Paxton, Alan Arkin, Darshan Jariwala, Tzi Ma English with some Hindi

Million Dollar Arm is such a quiet film that it would be easy to under-rate it. Anyone can guess how it will end for the protagonists, yet – unlike most sports films where we already know the central character won that World Cup or breasted that tape at the nth second – this one doesn’t build up an artificial frenzied suspense around the baseball field. What it does is introduce us to this wonderfully gray real-life American sports agent called J.B. Bernstein who plucks two poor boys out of India and takes them to the US to make them Major League Baseball players.

This is a biopic-of-sorts of JB (Jon Hamm) who has been struggling to survive since he started his own business. To save his career, he decides to find baseball’s next big sensation in India, to convert one of the cricket-crazy nation’s bowlers into a baseball pitcher. JB flies off to hold the Million Dollar Arm contest in India. With the help of the crotchety old sports scout Ray (Alan Arkin) and local baseball enthusiast Amit (Pitobash), he finally finds young Rinku Singh (Suraj Sharma) and Dinesh Patel (Madhur Mittal). From there the film takes us through the boys’ discovery of the US, JB’s opportunistic view of them as “investments”, and his gradual conversion from being a “Class A jerk” as his girlfriend calls him.

A story like this is fertile ground for condescension. This could have been a patronising white-man-saves-little-brown-people saga told in the kind of tone we’ve heard from too many Western journalists in the past year while covering India’s anti-rape protests, Moon Mission and other news developments. With masterful deftness though, director Craig Gillespie and writer Tom McCarthy pull back and hold a mirror to JB each time they’re entering tricky territory, giving us a surprisingly sensitive take on alien cultures, disparities and commonalities, underdogs, unwitting racism and white-man-who-is-saved-from-himself.

JB’s early impression of India is a quick composite of crowded roads, traffic jams, chaos and animals on city streets, but at the hands of DoP Gyula Pados nothing is over-emphasised to exoticise. Slumdog Millionaire’s critics may possibly have objections here too, but to be fair, it is but natural for a foreigner to be struck by these overwhelming aspects of India before they notice glitzy hotels, malls, factories and prosperity. It is to Gillespie’s credit that he presents to us these elements of the Indian reality without caricaturing the country.

We get a brief glimpse of Ray sneering at a goat’s kid on a two-wheeler riding beside his car in Mumbai, and an equally fleeting look at JB’s plush hotel in the city. There’s this and there’s that – fair enough then. A.R. Rahman’s music suffers one jarring moment when he includes some bars from Slumdog’s Ringa ringa in the background score, but for the most part it too is engaging and shorn of clichés.

Where the film falls short is in the depiction of the people at large, which could have been more well-rounded without turning Million Dollar Arm into a documentary on India. For instance, the scene depicting the boys’ wide-eyed wonderment when they enter an elevator for the first time is matter-of-fact without being patronising. Of course poor Indian village boys who’ve never been inside a modern building would be fascinated by lifts. In a world where too many Westerners think those are the only kind of Indians in existence though, it is a glaring flaw not to at least briefly introduce viewers to the other kind of Indians, the ‘people like us’ characters, the ones for whom a lift is not a discovery, the ones who are as exasperated by goats and cows on streets as a foreigner might be shocked, amused and bemused.

Million Dollar Arm scores though with its immaculate casting. Few men can play a slimeball in a suit with as many layers as Hamm, well-known in India for his role in TV’s Mad Men. The actor makes JB a character who is hard to hate even when he’s despicable, the sort of chap about whom you feel you know there’s a good guy lurking around somewhere inside him.

Suraj Sharma from Life of Pi is growing into a handsome young fellow, as is the potentially hunky Madhur Mittal who played the wayward elder brother in Slumdog. Both are spot on in their depiction of youthful confidence that occasionally hits a slump. They are so natural before the camera and so charming, that it becomes easy to imagine why JB’s neighbour Brenda would feel a certain tenderness towards them. Brenda is played by Lake Bell who is familiar to Indian viewers from Boston Legal. Her searingly astute observations about JB make for some of the film’s most well-written moments.

Pitobash as Amit is the one who could have ended up being Million Dollar Arm’s only cliched desi. Instead, this gifted actor holds back some of his innate rusticity and exuberance to give us a winning character. The screenplay wisely allows Amit, Rinku and Dinesh to have most of their conversations in Hindi. This gives the dialogues a natural tone, with the Indians speaking not in the stereotypically sing-song, accented English of The Simpsons’ Apu, but in the kind of English and Hindi that real Indians from their particular background would use.

The remaining roles are all played by talented actors who make their few minutes on screen count, including poor Aasif Mandvi who is saddled with the only badly written part. It seems as though someone forgot that business partners are actually supposed to do something in the business. Mandvi’s Ashu Vasudevan seems to contribute little to JB’s firm.

It needs to be pointed out that the film creates the impression that the Million Dollar Arm contest got a lot more coverage in the Indian national media than it did in reality. It should have also been clarified that baseball is many light years away from getting the “billion new viewers” that JB thought his contest would earn for the game in India. This country is still obsessed with cricket, and baseball is still largely a distant sport.

That being said, it goes without saying that the contest changed the lives of the real Rinku and Dinesh. This film though is the heart-warming story of how they changed the real JB’s life. No doubt JB was on an exploitative, self-serving mission, but the boys were too innocent to get that. No doubt the story is focused on JB and not the boys, which some may even see as its failing. However, by the end of its 122 minutes we get to know Rinku and Dinesh just that little bit more and are left with a cloud of warmth floating around the heart. This is a film that’s small in scale, with no pretensions whatsoever to grandeur. Million Dollar Arm is a pleasant and deliberately under-stated ‘melodrama’, as dramatic and real as real life usually is.

Rating (out of five): ***1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time: MPAA Rating (US):	122 minutes PG (for mild language and some suggestive content)
Release date in the US:	May 16, 2014

Poster courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_Dollar_Arm