A Bunch of Thoughts on "Happy New Year"

1) This film is long. SO long. There's a moment, right before Farah Khan's name shows up in the opening credits, when Shah Rukh Khan's voiceover informs us that "Lambi kahaani hai" ("It's a long story.") An hour in, the movie was barely done introducing its principal cast, and I realized that SRK's line might, in fact, have been a threat. 

The problem is, they easily could have trimmed about a third of the film without losing out on anything substantive. The protagonist, Charlie, is planning a heist to avenge his father. It's not a super-unusual or particularly interesting heist (it's got the usual lasers and passwords and vaults), except for the fact that he and his ragtag team have to participate in a dance competition in order to pull it off. But the audience has Charlie's plan explained to it at (excruciating) length again and again and again. Also, Farah Khan stages some fun gags and comic moments, but too many others just don't land. Nandu (Abhishek Bachchan) vomits at will, Jags (Sonu Sood) goes into rages when he thinks people are insulting his mother, Boman Irani's character gets stress fits. None of this is particularly funny, and all of it happens too often and for too long.

2) You know what they could have spent more of the film's exhausting run time on? Deepika Padukone. She may not be the great dancer she's playing (she is stunning but stiff in Lovely, winningly fluid in Manwa Laage and the final dance number), but she has a delightful facility with the tonal shifts that often characterize masala movies. She can go from broad comedy to heartfelt, outsized emotion with no sign of strain. In Bollywood comedies, female actors rarely get to be funny, but Padukone steals every scene she's in. She's become the sort of actor-star that has you rooting for her no matter how under-written her part is. I missed her when she wasn't on screen. I wanted more of her.

3) I didn't want more of SRK's Charlie. however. One reason I enjoyed the much-maligned Jab Tak Hai Jaan so much is that Khan got to be charming in that easy, humorous, movie-star way that he possesses but hasn't shown us too often in recent years. I wish that's the sort of easy, unclenched attitude he'd gone for here, because that's the only way this sort of larger-than-life, filmi badass character works. (Watch Hrithik's sexy turn in Dhoom 2 and then Aamir's constipated one in Dhoom 3, and you'll know what I mean.)

My favorite SRK moments in this one were in the Satakli song where he got to be happy and smiley and just hang with the rest of the gang. SRK can play Big Man in Charge well, but only when the character is inherently the kind of guy you do want in charge (Kabir Khan in Chak De!), not just someone who gets to be the boss-dude because he's played by a superstar.  

Charlie is such a douche, though. He ropes in people who have nothing to do with his vendetta into his plan, knowing full well that if something goes wrong, they could go to jail as well. (We learn soon enough that his master plan, the one that has his gang constantly falling at his feet for, is flawed.) He constantly puts down Nandu and Mohini because the former is from a less privileged background and thus not classy enough, and the latter is a "bar-dancer" and therefore pretty much a sex worker. (Nothing wrong with being a sex worker. Unless, of course, you're chilling with Charlie. Because he'll be mean to you about it. Ugh.) Charlie also gets his nemesis's son thrown into jail even though that dude did nothing wrong. (I mean, his hair was . . . not good, but that is not a punishable offense.)

4) I have to, as always, give SRK credit for being a generous producer. The money shows on screen. The films toplined by most of the over-40 male superstar brigade usually look pretty low-rent these days, with tackily filmed songs and ugly sets. You just know that most of these films' giant budgets have gone straight into the pockets of their middle-aged leading men. But Khan actually wants to, at the very least, put on a good-looking show. He doesn't callously assume that the adoring fans will show up no matter how shoddily assembled the product is just because he's starring in it. Farah Khan, of course, is a deft hand with the only-at-the-movies spectacle; here, she serves it up in enormous, candy-colored heapings. You definitely want to see the aerial shots of Dubai all lit up on a big, big screen. Take food and a pillow, though, if you go. Seriously, I felt like I was in there for years.

5) The song sequences are pretty fun, but I really wish the staging and choreography had been more inventive. Remember the Farah Khan who shot Main Hoon Na's Chale Jaise Hawaein in one long, uninterrupted take? Remember her gloriously manic technicolor qawwali from the same film? I miss that Farah.

6) Speaking of Main Hoon Na, is it possible that Farah's never made a film since that hit her debut's sublime meta-masala high because she worked with a writer who could actually write on that one? Her subsequent films have had good gags here and there, but haven't worked as a coherent whole. Main Hoon Na, too, featured the over-the-top patriotism and the revenge plot that Happy New Year relies on, but those tropes worked because the characters felt like people, not accessories in extended comedy bits, and the world of the film felt fully realized, as loony as it was. (Hit Abbas Tyrewala up again, Farah! Or maybe Anurag Kashyap, since he's obviously willing to do crazy stuff for you! Anurag, good on you for being so game in your cameo, but that cross-dressing gag was not cool.) 

Related: Who would've thought that Rohit Shetty would make a better masala comedy with Shah Rukh Khan in the lead than Farah Khan? I'm just as shocked as anybody else.

7) I used to think self-referential Bollywood in-jokes were so funny and clever back in the early 2000s, but with this film, I think I'm completely over them, especially in SRK's movies. Keep those arms firmly pinned to your side, SRK. Never repurpose DDLJ quotes again, SRK.

8) Sonu Sood is the modern-day Vinod Khanna, right? Impossibly handsome, totally underrated, and with that unmissable quality of solid, heroic decency. Let's make Sonu Sood a star! (I actually kinda wanted Sonu and Deepika's characters to get together. He was so nice to her!) Also, while we're on the subject of handsome, underrated dudes, more Jackie Shroff, please. This film gives him a bit more to do than Dhoom 3, and his character here, a straight-up villain, is way more likable than the daft fool he played in that dull film. Dude knows how to chew up some primo scenery. Anyone who wants "I support the Shroffaissance" buttons and T-shirts, get in touch with me.

9) Abhishek is basically playing Uday Chopra's character from the Dhoom series here. He does it as well as Uday. (This is a compliment. Uday was, no lie, the best thing about Dhoom 3. By this point, you might have guessed that I did not much care for Dhoom 3.)

10)  I wasn't the only one rooting for the team of cute children to win the Indian rounds of the World Dance Championship, right? Those little girls looked so crestfallen when they lost!

On "Haider"

Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider is an achievement of lyrical, humanistic storytelling. Dense with history, but never pedantic, the film asks why people - creatures of flesh and blood, of love and desire, of songs and laughter - are the first to stop being of significance, to become invisible, to disappear in times of sociopolitical conflict. It is a pointed, sorrowful question, and Haider is a pointed, sorrowful movie.

Bhardwaj's retellings of Shakespeare's tragedies have always felt flavorful and specific, because he always finds a milieu for these centuries-old stories that gives them a jolt of immediacy and topical charge. You may not know the ins and outs, the various versions of the Kashmir story, or be intimately acquainted with this particular moment (the mid-nineties) in its history. But Haider's world will seem at least a little familiar to you, because various iterations of this setting – places of fear and grief and resentment, of soldiers in the streets and of diminished families in homes – are so often in the news that we are probably horrified when we pause to consider how used we've grown to the sights and sounds of people suffering. 

Haider's Kashmir is remarkable not just because of its powerful depiction of that sort of suffering, though. (At one point, a doctor diagnoses Haider with PTSD, but it isn't just him, the film suggests. The entire state is shellshocked. The trauma runs so deep that men have forgotten how to enter their own houses without being frisked.) It is also deeply moving in its evocation of a way of life that we haven't seen often enough on cinema screens. Bhardwaj goes in search for the color and richness in that way of life. He puts a ear to its heart for the music and the poetry in its voices. Fathers and sons sing together. Children learn and play. The dizzying patterns of flowers woven into the carpets and the shawls and painted onto the stoneware shimmer even as life after life goes barren. Haider casually situates its characters amid the flames of Kashmir's gulmohar trees and the elegant inevitability of its snowdrifts, not because these are picturesque, but because these characters belong to this beauty, and this beauty belongs to them. Haider reminds the viewer that the lives that we reduce to numbers (these many dead, these many wounded) are not abstractions. Bhardwaj doesn't dramatize this assertion with cinematic patness or with a heavy, accusing hand. He lets the intimate, warm, lived detail accumulate in each scene until this place feels real and bloody with life - life lived, savored, lost, wasted, truncated. Just as the Faiz Ahmed Faiz verses that close the film, Haider grieves the dead and the living left behind.

The question of grief is of great interest to Bhardwaj here. Haider doesn't know how to even begin grieving. How to process his beloved father's disappearance, his beloved mother's apparent betrayal? He acts out, he comes undone, he haunts the ruins of his childhood home. (Ghosts are a preoccupation in the film. The absence of disappeared family members haunts the lives of their loved ones, holding them in limbo. The specter of old joys and old loves hangs heavy. Men with mutable identities resurface from certain death and disappear into the snow. The Kashmir of Haider is, among other things, a cemetery, and nothing in it is completely dead.) Haider is furious and confused and unhinged and broken, sometimes all at once, and he stumbles painfully in his darkness. Shahid Kapoor, whose melancholy prettiness, sweet voice, and slightly manic way with comedy (and there is a good deal of twisted, Kafka-esque comedy here) suit him to Bhardwaj's cinematic vision, drives that pain home with emphatic grace. His scenes with Tabu (who plays his mother, Ghazala) are devastatingly romantic, the two performers responding to each other's faces and bodies and voices with clarity that feels instinctual. 

While Haider mourns as if that mourning is all that is real to him, Ghazala is aching to be done with mourning. She wants to free herself from the unhappiness of an unsatisfactory marriage, of a missing husband, of a long-absent son. Tabu, as this complex, fascinating character, does the kind of magisterial work that stays with you for a long time. Here is an actor whose unnervingly beautiful face I can watch for hours as it changes shade and register. She brought so much (sex, sadness, intelligence, charisma) to every line, every glance, every silence that I began wishing that the movie were entirely from Ghazala's perspective. Both mother and son are sympathetic. (Very few characters are painted entirely black in Haider; even Kay Kay Menon's unctuous, plotting uncle is lovelorn and wracked with guilt.) The plight of these two allows the film to wonder about the dilemma faced by a wounded people. Ought they to move forward? Can they move forward? Or must they engage again and again with their grief? Haider doesn't come to straightforward conclusions, but it nods toward both remembrance and compassion. The story ends, as everyone knows, in death. But Haider is not merely dirge; it is also serenade.

On "Gone Girl"

The protagonists in Gone Girl are lovely to look at, but they do ugly things to each other and to the people around them. Their first encounter is charming; the kiss it culminates in is one of the prettiest things I've seen at the movies this year. Powdered sugar swirls in the air, dusting Rosamund Pike's movie star face (a face that like her performance is much more uncompromisingly chilly than one might have expected for Amazing Amy, but perhaps much more interesting for that unexpected touch of ice), and Trent Reznor's gleaming, potent score is full of twilit magic. The proposal of marriage is also charming; Ben Affleck's Nick gallantly saves Amy from embarrassing media questions with cute compliments and a ring. But the marriage itself is neither charming nor charmed for long. It becomes an unhappy, unfortunate thing when the marital set these two perform on changes to a space that is less prettily designed, harder to "block." There's this moment (maybe made up) when Amy asks Nick why he's forcing her to be that wife – the nag, the harridan. That's not the role she wants to play. She'd rather be the cool wife, the good wife, and he is to be the good husband. But it isn't easy to be good or cool when there is no more money and no more big city glamor. It is easier to lie and to cheat and to hate each other. Nick doesn't make Amy feel light like he used to; he drains her of her patience and her resources. Amy doesn't make Nick better or smarter anymore; she makes him feel cornered and diminished. The relationship goes from symbiotic to vampiric. People stalk and beat and kill in Gone Girl; gore is splattered in sick, abstract-expressionist tableaux. But what makes this movie scary is the notion that love warps so easily into something monstrous and keening for blood. We claim to know, really know our life partners, our spouses, but can we really know another person? Can we know what will make the switch flick and the light go out in the beautiful, beloved heads of the people we hold closest to ourselves. Fincher suggests that the most frightening monsters might not be under the bed but in it, right next to us.

Gone Girl sets its mystery, with the sort of mounting pressure that makes you feel like you're arrested in the final moments of an unpleasant dream, struggling to wake up but also curious to see how it all turns out, against an inquiry into the workings of a marriage. That relationship, much like the town that Amy goes missing in, is portrayed here as a thing of sunny surfaces and a cankered underbelly. New Carthage is photogenic suburbia peopled with sunny Midwesterners in some scenes, and seedy ruins full of broke, broken shadow-folk in others. In marriage too, there are the stories one tells – of annual wedding anniversary treasure hunts, for instance, or of little signals to signify trust or love that only one's significant other can recognize, and then then there are the resentments that charge these benign-seeming totems of the relationship and turn presents into weapons and shared vulnerabilities into exploitable weaknesses. Gone Girl is interested in the falsehoods intrinsic to romantic relationships that couples hide out of sight underneath the signifiers of a fairy-tale romance. The film asks us to consider that the marriage narrative is one that inevitably loses steam as time goes on, has its powdered-sugar enchantment rubbed off it by the banal realities of strained finances, say, or unmet expectations. Perhaps the way to avoid the commonplace ending – the prolonged low-key misery of long-term unhappiness or the charmless grotesquerie of divorce – is to borrow tropes from outside the genre, so to speak, of the love story. Both Amy and Nick are writers, after all. While Nick, often the less sharp mind in the relationship, writes in clichés outside the margins of his marriage, Amy much more inventively borrows from the whodunit, (She even does homework for her plan with books on murder.) Just as she plotted games in which her husband looked for clues that led him to a present, she plots a jape in which he might end up in jail for her murder. Fun!

Fincher plays at length with the idea of marriage as a fundamentally performative construct, a story to be written and read and acted out, a spectator sport. The neighbors, the friends, the parents, even the media in a certain kind of relationship are watching open-mouthed and hungry for the next twist as they would a film, a television show, or a play – and then passing judgment as they would on said film, television show, or play. Gone Girl's twisted sense of humor comes from its investigation of real life as reality-TV-esque spectacle. The entire nation is perversely gripped by the Nick and Amy's strange situation. They want more. In a deliciously ironic scene, Nick sees that his once-failing bar is the town hot-spot, now that its owner might be a murderer. A woman, styled like someone out of the Real Housewives franchise and volunteering at Amy's search headquarters, wants to take a smiling selfie with Nick and later sends it to a smarmy, outraged newsperson. Tanner Bolt (played with glorious, amused understatement by Tyler Perry) tells Nick: "You two are the most fucked up people I know, and I specialize in fucked up people." He is laughing; he is entertained by their spectacle. And he is not alone. Everyone wants to watch, hear about, and be part of Nick and Amy's freak show.

But the outsiders are not the only spectators here. Nick and Amy watch each other, and watch themselves watch each other. At first, they act out better, cooler versions of themselves to reel the other in, and then, when Nick loses interest, Amy decides it’s time to amp the drama up. And it works. Because Nick is paying attention not only to Amy’s machinations, but to his own responses. He preens after getting a TV interview right, for instance. He’s made an impression. He’s got through to her. Even after she comes back, and he finds himself stuck in the mousetrap of his marriage, he is at least a little into it. Because there are ways out of that mousetrap, if he really wanted to make a run for it. The audience knows it, his endlessly supportive sister Margo (Carrie Coon, a dry, authentic standout in a terrific supporting cast) knows it, and he knows it. But Nick, with his folders full of ideas for novels he's never written, is now living in an interesting story, is finally an interesting character. Amy, too, returns to him, risking exposure, because she finally feels seen. For Amy, to be seen as she is - devious, destructive, exacting, uncompromising - is to be loved. If Nick knows her, he loves her, must love her, will love her.

While Gone Girl manages to hint at all these engaging ideas within the framework of a relentlessly entertaining thriller, While Gone Girl manages to hint at all these gripping ideas within the framework of a relentlessly entertaining thriller, I think its critique of marriage could have been more nuanced if the narratorial scales had been more balanced. Both Nick and Amy are fucked up people who do fucked up things. Nut since the narrative is mainly focalized through Nick for the first half of the film, and he is being hounded and grilled (though we don’t know yet for certain if he deserves to be or not), we react with cautious sympathy to him, handsome and likable, albeit, as we learn, pretty flawed. Amy, on the other hand, emerges initially from her journal entries. She is perfect and love at first in these entries, and then perfect and scared. But we are meant to think that she might already be dead when we hear from her via the journal. So her voice is not as real to us, her troubles not as immediate and pressing as Nick's. (Though her diary indicates that he was physically violent with her, that he was a profligate spender, that he didn't want her to get pregnant, his bafflement at these charges reads as pretty genuine to us.) By the time we learn that she isn't dead, and we finally get her "true" perspective, she is revealed to be a diabolical villainess, hell-bent on destroying her husband's life for a crime he didn't commit. And she's destroyed a former paramour's life. And she'll go on to kill another lover. While her husband's misdeeds – the cheating, the neglectfulness – are crappy, they are also human. Amy does evil things because she wants revenge. We never truly get to see the character as a fully realized person as opposed to a figment of her own diabolical imagination or an almost-mythic beast of vengeance. She tells us that the initial years of her marriage truly were good, that Nick really did make her feel happy. We also get to see a brief glimpse of her as someone with emotions other than rage when she finds out that her husband is now enamored with a younger woman, even though she has given up her money, her life in New York, and a good deal of her emotional energy for him. Rosamund Pike brings a world of shading to that wordless, almost throwaway moment. But it is not enough. If the story is about a philandering doofus and the psychopath who brought him to heel, its reflections on the psychosis of marriage itself become less provocative. The film, then, functions as a very solid example of modern noir, but maybe not much more. And it becomes a more troubling piece of art, too, since Amy's legitimate complaints and concerns about men who don't try hard enough and expect too much, about women who have to keep trying with diminishing returns, become moot, since they're coming out of the mouth of the person who cried rape and murder. I worried that the film could be trivializing the issues of violence against women, that a certain kind of person, who unfortunately abounds in society, would take away from this film the moral that women do make this shit up all the time, or that they're crazies who asked for it.

But I think Fincher is actually interested in more than a crackling genre exercise or a blasé indictment of “psycho bitches.” Its interrogation of how people in relationships connect to and alienate each other, put on a show for and reveal themselves to each other feels neither incidental or accidental (and it helps that Affleck and Pike play their characters as more than just a hapless schmo and an ice-demon, respectively). The failure, then, is one of (too-faithful) adaptation, to borrow a phrase from this sharp piece. Sure, the idea of this force of implacable evil as a villain makes for compelling storytelling, but we see (in her scenes at the motel, at Desi’s house) that Amy has glimmers of more than that. What if Fincher and Flynn had gone mining for more of those glimmers instead of giving in to the temptation of creating a Big Bad? What if they’d disposed of that previous boyfriend and given Nick a different hook to claw his way into Amy’s psyche with? I wonder, but as it stands, Gone Girl still feels like something more than soapy, scary fun. I find myself wrestling with its pleasures and problems days after I watched it, and I suspect that while it doesn’t marry (ha!) its more interesting concerns entirely successfully with its pursuit of more pulpy pleasures, it still manages to poke around in some dark, troubling places in that attempt.