First Take | Surviving disasters, manmade or otherwise

Real-life survival dramas can only go one way: the  way they actually went. So all we have to do is google ‘Tham Luang cave rescue’ to know what actually happened to the  twelve boys and their coach who were trapped in the cave in Thailand for nearly two weeks.

So what  makes Ron Howard’s Thirteen Lives so special, one of the year’s finest  films, if not THE finest film of 2022? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the cave: mysterious dark and menacing, more so than E M Forster had ever imagined the Marabar Caves in A Passage To India to be. It in the Tham Luang cave that  twelve very young  boys  and their football coach are trapped during an adventure expedition.

More than a dramatic survival drama, Ron Howard is interested in the sudden surge of global humanism that erupted when the incident occurred in 2018. Top shots of hundreds and thousands of volunteers parked outside the cave where the boys’ deserted bicycles lie in an accusing row, are flashed on screen, not to impress us with an epic vision (which the film unquestionably possesses)  but to touch our hearts and soul with a message of profound humanism that words cannot describe.

Man is an essentially a selfish animal. More so now after the pandemic when even the quotient of family care has dwindled. To see such a surge of kindness in Howard’s film is indescribably beautiful. Watching Thirteen Lives is an enormously emotional experience. The innocence and fear of the trapped boys, the anguish and hope of their parents, the  guilt of the football coach, and above all the selfless determination of  the rescuers to get the boys out against impossible odd…days  after watching the film my eyes well up at the sheer benevolence of this mellow drama.

While this is not a performance-oriented film, I have to make mention of Viggo Mortensen as British rescuer Richard Stanton. I couldn’t recognize him until the end credits informed me who he was.Viggo  does this to me every time. He is a   different  person  on screen  in each film. I am afraid Colin Farrell as  Mortensen’s companion just doesn’t have the same  scope ; also, Farrell’s home life in London rings hollow. It is the only false note in a near-flawless symphony of  empathy and survival.

The film is shot with the kind of unnerving authenticity that big, commercial films on disaster occurrences from Hollywood normally miss by miles. Ron Howard is not interested in doing a Towering Inferno or a Titanic. His poison is  humanism. Howard deep-dives into the cave and emerges with a resonant  statement on human compassion.

Sometimes, we just forget how selfish we intrinsically are. This is one of those rare occasions. Thirteen Lives is  a wonderful film, deeply moving. Its humanism permeates our souls. And that’s a very rare thing to happen.

Ron Howard, who is being hailed as a master storyteller for Thirteen Lives, delivered a disaster of another kind altogether with his last film. While we fete  director Ron Howard’s latest work 13 Lives for its authentic depiction of a true-life tale of  human resilience, Howard’s last film was summarily stigmatized  for that very reason. Critics slammed Ron Howard’s Hillybilly Elegy for making misery-porn. Everyone who was anyone did a mob lynch on the film when it  deserved nothing but admiration for going into the deepest  sorrows of a demonically  dysfunctional family in Ohio (US) and how the family’s grandson  pulled himself  out of  the familial  pit  and made a success of of his life.

After  watching Ron Howard’s 13 Lives, I recently saw Hilbilly Elegy again and loved its cacophonous  tone of  storytelling where within the shrill protests of  a  ill-starred  family where a young man struggles ahead, torn between his  duties towards a violent drugged mother and his own ambition of escaping his predestined life.

The film’s weakest link is Gabriel Basso as JD, the young protagonist struggling to  make ends meet while his family pulls him back to his roots where he wants to escape from. Basso, I feel, was chosen for his physical resemblance to the real character, and that raises the issue of what constitutes a consummate  biopic: physical or spiritual kinship?

Glenn Close and Amy Adams are magnificent as  maladroit matriarchs. Adams  has a tough role as an irresponsible abusive loathsome mother. Her scenes with the young JD (played with more feeling by Owen Asztalos than Gabriel Basso who plays the older version) are turbulent while her scenes with the grownup JD are redemptive. In both the phases, Amy Adams is unafraid of the camera catching her rawest emotions.

In the best scene between mother and son, JD lets go of his frightened ailing mother’s hand to drive back to Washington for a  job interview. It’s heartbreaking separation that cuts the umbilical cord a little too late.

Glenn Close as JD’s grandmother is a force of nature. Fighting, abusing, struggling to give her grandson a decent upbringing, Close was nominated for the Rasberry award for Worst Supporting award. Amy Adams was also slammed. But they both received Golden Globe/Oscar nominations for the same performances in Hillbilly Elegy.

How do we explain the savage reviews for this film? What exactly did the American critics not like in Hillbilly Elegy? Was it the lack of laughter in the  storytelling? The pall of gloom that pervades the family? But this is not a cheerless film. There are some memorable light moments especially between  JD and his Indian girlfriend Usha, played by Freida Pinto, who has very little to do except “be there” for the troubled protagonist.

Hillbilly Elegy walks through troubled lives. It is a painful but rewarding walk. Moving back and forth between the childhood and adult years of its protagonist, director Ron Howard constructs a compelling case for the family-is-everything argument, but be warned: an overdose of family obligations can kill ambition.

Mahesh Narayanan and the great Fahadh Faasil have collaborated on three earlier films. Their partnership paid rich critical dividends in Malik, a gangster  epic that left me underwhelmed. I am much more at  peace with their latest collaboration in Malayankunju, a film about coming to terms with our demons of  prejudice and intolerance, within where Mahesh Narayanan’s writing falters at times, but doesn’t impact the film’s overall mood or tenor. For, faltering is  part  of the protagonist’s DNA. When Anil (Faasil) falters, the screenplay seems to echo his uncertainties.

From the beginning Anil seems a troubled man. He is an electronics repairman who lives with his mother in a coastal town prone to landslides .When a  meteorological announcement asks the neighbourhood to evacuate, Anil sneers and chooses to remain home while everyone else leaves  .

Then, within seconds, Anil is buried under his own home as a massive landslide strikes. This is where the actual film begins. The entire landscape of despair and destruction is a designer’s dream and an actor’s nightmare. Stuck underground, Anil, as played by Fahadh Faasil, grapples with voices in his head. The merger of illusion and reality is astutely achieved in a film that talks of survival not of the fittest. But of the fortunate.

In Anil’s case the aftermath of the landslide changes him completely. A moral upgradation is a literary luxury. How  many people are actually changed after an ostensibly life-changing experience? Most  go back  to their  old ways after a while. I wonder if Anil too reverts to the being the scowling nasty son of a glitch.

That reminds me of Anil’s deceased father. He killed himself after his daughter(played by the talented Rajisha Vijayan) eloped while her wedding was on. Since then, Anil has cut all ties with his sister, his bone of contention being, why did she have to wait until the wedding to elope when her father had to sell his land for it?

It’s a valid point in an otherwise-unreasonable protagonist’s twisted  perception. There are so many things to like about Mahesh Narayanan’s  screenplay, not the least of them being Anil’s neighbour’s newly-born baby’s crying which irritates Anil to no-end, but finally leads him out of the rubble of Nature’s fury into safety.

In spite of the over-sentimental, neatly-moral  wrap-up, Malayankunju works: it is vibrant with allusions to destiny and mortality, although none of these  facets of the screenplay are cut and pasted into the portal of the audiences’ perception. Gentle even when Nature’s at its most brutal Malayankunju works for its heart-stopping depiction of Nature’s destruction. Most of all it is Fahadh Faasil’s most physically challenging role to date which has us in a thrall.

How far would an actor go for a role? Fahadh provides the answer.

It seems uncanny that Jayasurya, one of my favourite actors in Malayalam cinema, played a man who loses his voice in his last film Meri Awas(sic.) Suno. Now, in his latest film, titled John Luther, Jayasurya playing a cop on the trail of  a serial killer, loses his hearing after being hit on his temples by a goon. John  doesn’t waste time in self-pity. He immediately gathers his wits and the twenty percent hearing power in one ear that he still has, and moves back into action.

Whether it is Vellam, Sunny ,Meri Awas Suno or now John Luther, Jayasurya fearlessly ventures into the world of fractured broken, heroes who are determined to repair themselves. While he is uniformly (pun intended) excellent in John Luther, I am not very happy with the serial-killer murder mystery.

The police procedural lacks  vigour. No one except Luther seems really interested in knowing why random individuals of different ages and gender are  disappearing in the abundant foliage of Devikulam. The first twenty minutes of the screenplay (written by director Abhijeet  Joseph) is catastrophically bad. The writer-director comes to grips with the  plot only after Luther loses his hearing.

Ear is where the plot perks up. This is where Jayasurya steps in to elevate the  drama from a routine thriller to something extraordinary .His character is in quiet control of  the plot, also as an actor, Jayasurya brings out the layers of procedural pacing with more authority and command than the script demands.

The big revelation about the killer’s identity is hardly a shocker. We don’t know  much about the killer’s motives until the very end. But yes, the climactic action scenes staged in a hospital, where plastic curtains acquire a life of their own, is gripping to the point where I suspected that the entire script was woven around this fight.

While the whodunit is hardly a killer, there is some engaging dramatic tension in  John Luther’s troubled relationship with his father (Siddique). They meet  only to disagree. Siddique has a powerful emotional moment when he  discovers his son will never hear again. Sadly, the script seems to have no patience with the emotional moments, quickly sweeping them under the carpet  to get on with the police investigation which we really don’t care about.

In the rush to preserve the protagonist’s professional priorities, the character who comes off the poorest is John Luther’s wife (played by Athmiya Rajan). She is clueless about her husband’s work and at home, she must watch her husband growling and scowling at her father-in-law. In fact, no female characters get any voice in the plot. John Luther’s colleague, Felix (Deepak Parambol), gets to spend more time with John than anyone else in his life.

And yet, their work is not as exciting as it is meant to be. Sometimes, you just want the cop hero to go home.

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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