A few thoughts on Dangal (and Aamir)

Big understatement, this: I have mixed feelings about Aamir Khan. On the one hand, I get positive and reassuring vibes when I see him in interviews or in person (most recently at the warm and chatty Delhi launch of Akshay Manwani’s book about Aamir’s uncle Nasir Husain). He is well-spoken, comes across as forthright and sensitive, has a reputation for being the most accessible of Bollywood’s bigshots, and most importantly seems to have a sense of humour that moves between registers: wit, impishness, cheesiness.

Yet, almost every time I have watched one of his major films in the past decade (going back to at least Rang de Basanti), especially the ones he seems most personally invested in as an actor/producer/creative contributor, it has been with the sense that cinematic and narrative impetus must eventually yield to heavy-handed message-mongering. I have touched on this before, in pieces about PK and Taare Zameen Par and 3 Idiots (all of which I enjoyed in parts, and also felt exasperated by), and in this review of a book about Aamir.

There have been pleasant surprises too: having thought he was terrible in his gazing-soulfully-into-the-mid-distance role in Dhobi Ghat, I didn’t expect to be as moved by his PK performance as I was (but then, as I sometimes joke, maybe I find Aamir most convincing as an extraterrestrial). I liked Talaash very much, and thought there were some fine moments in his Dhoom 3 role, including the big reveal at the film’s midway point.

So… lots of ambivalence. And this extended to my Dangal experience. This is a film that I’ll probably be changing my mind about a lot – I have already had a few arguments about it in my head – which means that it’s sort of pointless to write a piece about it. But here are some notes, nearly all of them accompanied by the disclaimer that I might not feel this way a few weeks later (or after a second viewing, if that ever happens).

– At one point in the first half, when Mahavir Phogat was preparing his reluctant daughters for a wrestling career, this thought jogged through my mind: “Here's a story about child abuse** dressed up as an inspirational film, going all out to manipulate our feelings about nation-love and gender equality, with Aamir's presence – along with some Disneyfied comic moments and an upbeat background score – reassuring us that All is Well; that the ends will justify the means.”

Thinking about it later, I felt this assessment was too harsh if one considered the context, the setting, the situations of these people. How might a father in this milieu behave? How would his daughters respond to a drastic change in lifestyle, the rupture of their own conditioning about what girls are supposed to be like, the discomfort and the societal opprobrium? Is this “abuse” any different from the hundreds of big and small things that nearly all parents subject their children to?

– Despite having overcome a few of my initial reservations, I still think Dangal, for all its good intentions, is in at least one sense an oddly conservative film (AS OPPOSED TO a film that simply depicts a conservative world with honesty. Anyone who has read the Hrishikesh Mukherjee book will know how much I nitpick about the difference between these two things, and how annoyed I get by the sort of sweeping left-liberal criticism that yells “regressive film!” each time a film depicts a regressive character or action). I mainly had an issue with Geeta Phogat’s arc in the second half, and the sense that the film is taking a very definite position and inviting the viewer to take it too.

There is a strange, mixed message in the scenes that follow Geeta’s going to the Patiala academy for further training. On one hand the narrative sets up her new coach as a cardboard villain, implying that the drop in her performance has to do with the shift in coaching methods. But we also see that she is free and independent for the first time, and doing things that most young people (especially youngsters who had a large part of their childhood wrenched from them by an overbearing father) would naturally do in this situation. And that her concentration may have suffered to a degree because of this change in lifestyle.

Even if there is no actual slackening in her competitive spirit, moving away from her father’s influence should be seen as part of a growing-up process, and I was completely in Geeta’s corner at this point. But throughout the second half, there is the clear impression that despite Fatima Sana Shaikh’s excellent, sympathetic performance as the adult Geeta, moving between strength and vulnerability, the film itself wants us to disapprove of her altered arc, and to take the position of the “good” daughter Babita, who stands on the sidelines firmly supporting everything daddy says and looking at her sister with deep wells of disappointment in her eyes. Didn’t work for me.

– As often happens in Aamir Khan films, a point arrives where the need to spoon-feed a viewer or to grapple showily with an important social issue takes precedence over the need to tell a specific story as well as possible. That key scene where Phogat’s daughters’ eyes are opened by the little monologue of their friend, who tells them that their father at least recognises them as human beings who can achieve something – unlike most others who think of their daughters as property, to be dutifully raised for a few years, kept in the kitchen and then impersonally married off. It’s a pat little speech, progressive in all the obvious ways, it presses the right buttons, makes us feel ah, here is a film that is Trying to Say Something Important about parents and girl children and about how change can come to the regressive hinterland.

And yet. How relevant is it to the story we have so far been shown? Up to this point, this is a narrative about a man who has a single obsession, who then uses – some might say exploits – his children to achieve his goals for him. In the scene where Mahavir assesses his two girls after learning that they beat up two boys, he is looking at them as tools that he can bend to his own purpose. What validates his methods in the end and allows this to turn into a Big Picture/Social Message film is that 1) this is based on a real-life story about young women who won medals for their country, 2) the father is played by Aamir Khan. Which brings me to this next point:

– Dangal offers a good study in how our responses to a film are determined by the dominant star persona within it. As a thought experiment, imagine those early forced-training scenes with Mahavir played not by one of our most familiar and likable movie stars (and an actor who stands for a certain sort of upright value system in our current cinema, in the same way that actors like Gary Cooper, Tom Hanks and the pre-1946 James Stewart at different times represented the loftiest ideals of the American dream) but by an unknown 50-year-old, perhaps someone who looks more rough and menacing, doesn’t give wry, QS-cutey smiles every few seconds, and does the Haryanvi accent better than Aamir manages here. (Or perhaps even someone like the burly Amole Gupte, who was so miffed when Aamir took Taare Zameen Par out of his hands all those years ago.) Imagine how much more dark and discomfiting those scenes would have been then, even if everything else about them – the girls, the dialogues, the catchy music and funny song lyrics about papa as khalnayak – had been exactly the same.

(I don’t necessarily mean the above paragraph as a judgement on Dangal: all said and done, this IS an Aamir Khan film with AK in the Mahavir part, and almost everything about its tone and approach flows from that casting. Just saying that it may be a worthwhile thought experiment.)

– About the offhand clumsiness of the depiction of Geeta’s new coach: it’s a little embarrassing that an actor-producer as cerebral as AK has to repeatedly rely on this device, making the character he is playing look even better by pitting him against an antagonist who is a much-too-soft target for the viewer’s mockery or derision (and all this while making films that are supposedly “deeper” than the typical commercial Hindi movie). This comes on the heels of the sycophantic rote-meister Chatura in 3 Idiots and the irredeemably evil Godmen in PK, among other characters. (And, on a minor scale in this very film, we also have Geeta’s sneering, overconfident opponent in the final – neatly kowtowing to all the stereotypes held by Indian sports fans about the Ugly Australian).

– The wrestling scenes and the performances of the four main actresses: excellent. I doubt anyone would argue with that, and it’s the one thing I’m sure I won’t be changing my mind about (at least until I’m 70 and senile and become convinced that Aamir should have done a Kamal Haasan and played all five roles himself).

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** yes, I know “child abuse” is a very strong allegation to level at the protagonist of this film, even if one is saying it in a heated moment of righteous indignation, but I use it in the same sense as Richard Dawkins uses the term in the context of the indoctrination of religion in the very young and innocent. Perhaps a more reasonable position would be Uday Bhatia's suggestion, in this review, that a Foxcatcher-like film resides beneath Dangal's surface

[Related posts: PK, a book about Aamir Khan]