Amitabh Bachchan and Rashmika Mandanna's Goodbye is a sparkling take on the wages of mortality

If you can get over the initial hiccups—and I do mean that literally, since the vivacious Rashmika Mandanna kicks off the films with an atrocious drunken club song which leaves her dead drunk, rather, while she is obliviously drunk her mother is dead—if you can overcome the sheer mediocrity of the prologue, then Goodbye has many glorious, near-epiphanic moments of revelation on life and family ties to offer.

Director Vikas Bahl, who was on such an uneven wicket in Super 30 (not his fault really, if Hrithik Roshan was cast as Bihari mathematician Anand Kumar, we might as well have Mandana Karimi as Shakuntala Devi), spins a dreamy, disarming yarn about a death in the family. Amitabh Bachchan, in easily his best performance and film since Pink in 2016, plays the bullying patriarch, you know the father who thinks eating chicken or having sex when the matriarch has just died is a crime against humanity.

In a choked baritone, Mr. Bachchan tells his truant daughter (the aforementioned sodden merrymaker) that her mother passed away while (gritted teeth) the daughter was gallivanting. It’s a moment that persuasively defines the generation gap: having a night out celebrating with friends after winning your first case (yes, Rashmika plays a lawyer, although her profession has absolutely no relevance to the plot) is not a crime.

Neither, as mentioned, is butter chicken or sex after Mom’s death. I found this patriarchal gaze on mortality to be exceedingly fascinating—never seen it before in any Hindi cinema—provided it is not taken too far. But that’s exactly what happens when the grieving patriarch knocks angrily on his son’s bedroom door after hearing noises. Father says, ‘How can you do sambhog when your mother has just been cremated?’. Son, played by the excellent Pavail Gulati, says, ‘We are trying to fulfil mom’s wish to be a grandmother.’

Seriously? This exchange between incensed father and mortified son starts as being mildly satirical and ends up in a terribly awkward impasse. Vikas Bahl’s writing is not only uneven but also erratic. But when it is good, it is very very good. The girl gang of the dead mom (Neena Gupta, the best corpse since Satish Shah in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro), led by the outstanding Divya Seth, who should be doing a lot more work on screen, are hilarious in their anxiety to appear suitably aggrieved.

Ashish Vidyarthi as the self-appointed supervisor of post-death rituals, is that neighbour uncle we all know, and can do nothing about. And Elli Avram as the American bahu trying her utmost to blend with the environment of bereavement is surprisingly credible.

After the cremation, the narrative begins to lose moment. The family’s outing to Haridwar is pretty much an inevitable but pointless excursion. In spite of Sunil Grover’s inspired cameo as a local pundit with a surprisingly rational mind, the Haridwar episode lacks the harnessed energy of the first-half.

And why must Mr Bachchan speak to his wife’s ashes in a completely redundant and stretched-out monologue while the rest of the cast sits in the background as a bored blur?

Vikas Bahl, in what is incontestably his best work before or after Queen, should have been a little more economical with characters. What was the need for the bereaved family to be extended when they already had a son and a daughter of their own? Why would they adopt two sons, one of whom shows at the end because he had gone mountain climbing for Mama’s sake (sob, sob), a semi-adopted North Eastern girl and a dog aptly named Stupid?

Why cram the canvas when it is already so beautifully laden with the fruits of fertile storytelling? Goodbye is plush with likeable characters and performances. But the one who steals the show is a Malayalam actor named Martin Jishil who shows up at Rashmika’s door after her night of revelry, with her phone and the news that her mother is no more.

Where did they find this scene-stealer?

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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