Tubelight: The Tedious Tale Of A Total Dunderhead

For most method actors, the usual approach is either 'a method in their madness' or a 'madness in their method'. 

Robert De Niro and Daniel Day-Lewis believed in the former approach, going berserk with the physical and mental preparation needed for their legendary roles, going to the point of either eating like a monster or sweating it out to extreme levels. Marlon Brando, now, was of the second type, throwing around tantrums and making absurd demands, like asking Bernardo Bertolucci to stick up placards of his dialogues on the rear end of co-star Maria Schneider in the infamous 'The Last Tango In Paris'. All fascinating actors, all memorable performances. 

What about Salman Khan? He does not understand much of method. The last time when he trained hard to play a fighter of the ring, he chose to equate, in particularly bad taste, his effort with 'being raped'. Yeah, you heard that right. But even without that consideration, our Salman was never much of an actor really. Those who understood that were being simply smart. 

Director Kabir Khan is not one of them. Okay, so he did make us aware that if the screen behemoth can tone himself down and play himself without any pretensions, the results can be intriguing enough. But for 'Tubelight', Khan's latest film, the brief for Salman could have been to apply not method but just pile on the madness. 

Bollywood has quite a shoddy legacy of portraying lead protagonists with mental deficiencies and Salman's Laxman Singh Bisht falls into the same category as any of those ham-fisted performances that even our most seasoned performers could not make real. The 51-year old performer has stretched our imagination time and again in many a nonsensical yarn that requires him to chomp the frames but then they were not at all about a mentally disabled man and his ernest desire to earn moral credit, exaggerated stupidity not withstanding. From those ridiculously wide-eyed, incredulous expressions to the way he lets his lower lip hang down in a perennial frown to the overdone childish dialogue delivery, Salman's performance is embarrassing in its utter lack of subtlety or charm. And things don't help with the fact that he does not even appear adorably innocent to make us fall for him even superficially. 

But then, it would be an uphill task to come off as even slightly likeable or even charming in a film which itself feels fake. 

'Tubelight' is a cinematically revolting mess, the kind of blatantly self-indulgent and shallow film that masquerades as a smarter, more important or relevant film but does not have simply the brain, spine or heart to be it. Like its hero, Khan's film tries too hard to win our attention and sympathy but in the process, they both become downright annoying because there is nothing inherently striking in them to warrant the same. 

It begins sweetly, if artificially, enough, in a tinsel town up in the hills where brothers Laxman (an utter simpleton who seldom understands things) and Bharat (an average Sohail Khan) frolic around with the townsfolk and everything feels hunky dory when suddenly the war breaks out. Commanders and generals show up and announce that they need men to volunteer since many are being mowed down by the hell-bent Chinese troops hiding in the hills. Bharat volunteers as well and gets selected but, in the process, leaves his equally beefy and buff sibling to shed entire streams of tears and wonder when will his dear, dear brother be back with the other boys. 

It is at this point that the film begins to stumble down with Khan and co-writer Parveez Sheikh cramming in everything desperately to thicken the stew and the result is an overcooked, confused mess. Laxman is seemingly inspired by the idea of solid, unshakeable faith and conviction, one that Mahatma Gandhi taught to him when the great man came to town years ago. 'Tubelight' has everyone around Laxman, from a grand illusionist to a warm and grizzled uncle, keep on hammering this idea till the very end. The ruse here is that the plot cites the Gandhian thought of resilience and strength of conviction as prime virtues to be adopted. But in a misguided stroke of storytelling, it foregoes entirely the leader's steely determination and capacity for initiative, two things that Laxman never adopts, and robs the entire narrative of much needed flesh and blood. 

And that is the primary problem here in 'Tubelight'. Its noble, if extremely naive, intentions are diminished by the glaring absence of direction or even coherence. Saddened and unable to do anything whilst waiting for the war to end and his brother to return, Laxman is handed a list of the things that the Mahatma wished to teach the world and off he goes, literally doing those things in the most stupidly predictable way ever. So, when he decides to say the truth, his idea is to go and tell all the things that he hid from his teachers and the other townsfolk since childhood. It might sound fun but does it add up to anything? 

Rather, the film keeps on making him do one thing after another, befriending a mother-and-son duo who are Indians with Chinese ancestry and who become the target of the local folks who are clearly worried about losing their sons at the hands of the Chinese troops marching across the mountains.  The film focuses on their relationship but fails to develop them to the level that it makes us root for whatever fate is decided for them.'Tubelight' digresses into many directions, from the constantly growing menace of a losing war to the plight of the Chinese Indians stranded in a land that has now grown hostile to them to even Laxman's own possible coming of age against the backdrop but fails to develop any of these arcs successfully because it never explores the complexities that these proceedings require. It would be better and more rewarding if you listen to John Lennon sing 'Imagine' for that matter.

Khan has always been an awkward, safe-playing storyteller who has painted his strokes broadly without much of nuance but all his previous films, especially 'Bajrangi Bhaijaan', did have some striking bits of nuance or interesting nugget of truth that grounded them into reality. There is not much of that adroit political posturing in 'Tubelight' largely because everything is implied and never ever probed and the stakes never feel real. At one point, the said mother Lil Leing (a strictly serviceable Zhu Zhu) narrates her own woes, of how her family had been incarcerated in internment camps following the backlash after the Indo-China War broke out, but we never really empathise with her troubles. The war sequences, while staged with a fair level of competence, feel quite half-baked and even as there is a lot of talk about Indian soldiers suffering from shortages on the front in the hills, we never get to see the uglier, seamier truths of the conflict mentioned so implicitly in the film, except for one small intriguing bit about a soldier's shoes almost torn off during the battle. 

Still, there are a few stray bits and pieces that are well done, including a precious little moment when the little boy Guo (a plucky Matin Rey Tangu) insists that he can declare his Indian identity to all as and when he chooses to. It is a hint of all the potential that is wasted by Khan, who is too besotted with his titular dim-witted hero, who is made even more of a fool as the film proceeds. Okay, it is fine to make a mentally disabled protagonist a bit foolhardy in his actions but 'Tubelight' does not even do justice enough to make him either childishly smart and intelligent or even mischievous enough to be fun.

The rest of the cast is mostly fine. It is a delight to see lesser-seen but solid character actors like Brijendra Kala and Yashpal Sharma get a fair amount of leg space alongside the bulking Salman and the late and great Om Puri is as warm and wise as he had always been. The Shah Rukh Khan cameo works decently enough, with the star making a grand, theatrical entrance not unlike David Bowie in any of his seminal 1980s MTV hits and Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub is stellar and spontaneous as always, here playing the relentless bully Narayan who also becomes, unexpectedly, the most naturally likeable character in the film, for all his numerous failings. 

And yet, in a stroke of the worst kind of indulgence, 'Tubelight' is nothing about these worthy people. Rather, Khan has his focus reserved only for the disappointingly hammy Salman and the result is just pure tedium. 

One of the many questions that you will be asking at the end of this weary, tiresome film will be as follows: what is 'Tubelight' all about? Is it, living up to its name, about the said protagonist himself, an exceptionally slow-witted slacker who flickers to insight and intelligence only in fits and starts? Is it, like the now-superior looking 'Bajrangi Bhaijaan', an emotional drama centring on an unusual bond that transcends barriers of all kinds? Is it full of lovely insights on the nature of war, border conflict and does it demand for peace and harmony in its own heavy-handed yet effective way as that film did? No, it is none of these films, actually. 

To be honest, it is only about how much Salman Khan loves Sohail Khan in real life. 

My Rating: 1.5 Stars Out Of 5.