Selling the film rights for $1, Salman Rushdie entrusted his magical realism epic novel “Midnight’s Children” to his friend and director Deepa Mehta, believing she could surmount such a troublesome adaptation. Perhaps Rushdie should have left his masterwork alone.
The movie attempts to cram the huge scope of the novel, with its multitude of themes and characters, into a few hours of film. “Midnight’s Children” joins the plethora of great novels that should just not exist on the big screen.
“Midnight’s Children” tells of the legacy and life of Saleem Sinai, played by Satya Bhabha of “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” in the backdrop of a young, independent India trying to create an ordered nation from the chaos of imperialism.
Trying to summarize such a convoluted and complex movie with so many story lines and characters is difficult, but the main story occurs at the stroke of midnight on the night of India’s declaration of independence. Sinai, born of peasant parents, is switched at birth with Shiva (played by actor Siddharth), the baby of a rich family.
The film is immediately thrust into the realm of magical realism as Sinai and 1,000 other babies born at midnight become imbued with super powers. The strength of the power differs according to how close to midnight the children were born, with Saleem having the power to hear the thoughts of all the other children and organize them.
Bhabha does a good job of capturing Sinai’s exasperation as he tries to cope with his increasing alienation from a constantly changing India. However, at times his performance borders on the melodramatic, making it difficult to take his problems seriously.
The main problem is that even though it is a long movie, “Midnight’s Children” only gives a cursory examination of the novel’s ideas. Instead of cutting out story lines to thoroughly explore the central themes, Mehta includes every segment as if afraid to cut anything. One such part is when Sinai is forced into the army after an air raid on his home during the war between India and Pakistan.
Admittedly, the diverse sets that these unnecessary story lines take us to are beautiful and capture a little of the novel’s epic nature. The panoramic shots of the lush Indian countryside juxtaposed with body-ridden battlefields are extremely well shot, but this scene is not explored nearly enough to justify adding it into the film.
The historical elements of the film, also, seem jammed into the plot without so much as an introduction. We see India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi show up out of the blue and then declare war on the Midnight’s Children. Our introduction to the war between India and Pakistan is rushed as an afterthought to propel the film to its next story line.
While looking to be a faithful adaptation of the novel, “Midnight’s Children” seems to have a short attention span. So many interesting characters are introduced, yet left disappointingly unexplored.
One such character is Picture Singh, deemed the most charming man in the world, played by Kulbhushan Kharbanda. As a traveling snake charmer, he had so much potential to bring the novel’s humor into the film, but he acts like every other character, never distinguishing himself with interesting habits or personality.
The aspect of the novel that the film does well is Rushdie’s sonorous voice-overs that take actual lines from the book to transition between segments of the movie. Probably only because they directly bring some of the poeticism of the novel into the film, these voice-overs seem to be one of the few things providing connection between the two mediums.
Although it attempts to collect themes and story lines to synthesize them into a film that is as potent as the novel, it ultimately seems like a futile effort. “Midnight’s Children” may just be one of those books that resist any filmmaker’s translation.
Email Landau at alandau@media.ucla.edu.