Midnight’s Children (2012)

**/****
starring Satya Bhabha, Shahana Goswami, Rajat Kapoor, Darsheel Safary
screenplay by Salman Rushdie, based on his novel
directed by Deepa Mehta

by Angelo Muredda It's a nice bit of synergy, good for at least one heavily-latexed Tom
Hanks reincarnation, that Deepa Mehta's adaptation of Midnight's Children should come out so soon after the Wachowskis'
and Tom Tykwer's ill-fated stab at Cloud
Atlas, perhaps the only contemporary novel more labyrinthine than Salman
Rushdie's magic-realist opus. So earnest are both efforts that one is tempted
to ignore their fundamental failures as either cinema or adaptation and bow to
the good intentions of the faithful stewards. Yet one wonders about the value
of such graceful gestures when, combined, the two films take up a staggering
five hours–indefensible, given the limpid mysticism they have to show for
themselves at their muted conclusions. Read together, they're proof that in the
absence of a real necessity for adaptation, big novels make for small movies.

While Cloud Atlas's misstep is
a consequence of the filmmakers' misrecognition of David Mitchell's pointillist
worldview as a connect-the-dots essay on fate, in Mehta's case, it's her
goodwill to the author that proves most destructive. Rushdie announces himself
from the earliest moments, not only as a credited screenwriter but also as the
Dickensian narrator who introduces us to this transitional world of India on
the eve of its independence. It's Rushdie, then, who strikes the first flat
note of many with his avuncular reading voice, an instant admission that this
is going to be a problem film, an overly friendly book-on-tape rendition of a
difficult text. It's hard to think of an adaptation that required a firmer hand
to guide it than this one, making Rushdie's gentle intervention into his
own novel–rather like a live table-read–exactly the wrong approach.

Still, you can't blame Mehta for choosing such a safe throughline, given
the historical complexity of the material, which follows its characters back
through their family lines to British colonial rule, then forward to the
partition of India and Indira Gandhi's Emergency. The story nominally follows
the remarkable trajectory of Saleem Sinai (Darsheel Safary as an adolescent,
and Satya Bhabha in his twenties), the orphaned child of a street performer and
a vanquished colonial soldier (Charles Dance), switched at birth with a
landlord's baby by a hospital nurse (Seema Biswas) in a rare burst of utopian
sentiment towards the poor. That Saleem and his changeling double Shiva
(Siddharth Narayan), the wealth-bound infant raised as a pauper in his stead, each possess supernatural powers as a consequence of their birth at such a
charged political moment ought to be story enough. In hewing closely to the
novel, though, the film renders them as blips on a historical flowchart that
extends into wars to which they're only nominally connected, and it struggles in the
last act to shoehorn in a love triangle with a noble witch (Shriya Saran)
whose powers rival their own.

Saddled as she is with Rushdie's
hazy historical signposting, there's little excuse for Mehta's flat visual
style, particularly given the sensory vividness of her earlier films. The title
characters, a host of supernatural youth born between midnight and 1 a.m. on
Independence Day, get the worst of that aesthetic thrift: The sequences where
we see them telepathically assembled in Saleem's room have the same soft-focus
gauziness as a standard episode of "Touched by an Angel". Magical
realism is tough to capture onscreen, but Mehta doesn't even bother trying, having the characters instead describe their gifts in momentum-killing asides. Their
costumes, meant to be period-specific, reek of budgetary
restraint, resembling a dinner-theatre production of a historical epic. Only an
impromptu dance to the twist feels like an organic riff on the novel from a
director who thinks of herself as an equal to it, and there, too, the riff seems
calculated.

Its failings aside,
the film absorbs some of the book's thematic grace notes. There's much to
appreciate, for instance, in its emphasis on the mongrel nature of global
citizenship, as well as its insistence on focalizing world history through its
most tangential players: poor subjects who have no say in political
decision-making. But one doesn't emerge with a sense of the text's importance
or, for that matter, its narrative texture. Rushdie is a luxurious writer with
an offhanded gift for turning matters of great delicacy into witty,
easily-digestible aphorisms. Where his novel is complex, Midnight's Children is merely busy. Follow Angelo Muredda on Twitter