Let's be honest: nobody expects biographies of celebrities to be revealing character studies.
There is a reason behind this fallacy of any biopic about a much celebrated and controversial public figure: it has to do with just how we, as the spectators, resort to extreme viewpoints in our appraisal of the said celebrity. A celebrity, by default, is someone who is both loved and lambasted, hailed and hated, sympathised with and reviled. It is only a rare and discerning biopic that can balance both these extremes and even then, the perspective leans heavily towards any one of them. Just watch Richard Attenborough's Chaplin for instance.
There is then, uncannily, much common between that fundamentally flawed portrait yet often ambitious and stirring film and Rajkumar Hirani's sprawling yet quite seamlessly entertaining film and the biggest similarity may be just how both the films don't skimp on showing us the seams of the real-life silver screen legends they portray but they do it with a touch of sympathy and on a truly larger-than-life and even formulaic fashion too. It is also here that the similarities end as Sanju has, fortunately, a lot more to it than what its unassuming, even naive simplicity would suggest.
Sanjay Dutt was always the trouble-maker, the never-to-grow-up bad boy of Bollywood, who also happened to be, accidentally, a gritty and macho leading man best cut for the angry, sneering antihero of many a Mahesh Bhatt potboiler in the 80s and 90s. His life, on the other hand, was punctuated with fiery, audacious scandal; his career, save for those gems that surfaced only now and then, was punctuated mostly by failure and ridicule and given that his prowess and public image remain debatable to the day, it is natural that this should be such promising, rollicking premise.
Trust Hirani and co-writer Abhijat Joshi, two foxy collaborators who can play on the most obvious setups and subvert them not so subtly, to turn that premise into something unexpected: an emotional, even pulpy, yet intimate tale of fatherhood and friendship that works smoothly and self-assuredly in its own pace, propelled as it is with a barnstorming performance holding this film together with truly awe-inspiring ferocity.
Little doubt has been left of Ranbir Kapoor's infallible strengths at portraying young bravado, man-child predicament and rousing emotional conviction with a spontaneity and persuasiveness that never falters. But the actor is given here a particularly tall order, to capture the sensational and notorious actor not just in his jaunty physicality but also in his befuddled, boorish and bullheaded spirit. It is not even the slightest attempt at mimicry; it is mesmerising, maddening and quite magnificently entertaining.
The actor never ever misses his step or plays a false note; it is a showy, swaggering role from start to finish but Kapoor also lends him vulnerability, sly wit, winsome affability and even dashing, if foolhardy, heroics to spellbinding effect. There is so much here to love and treasure, from him bubbling with sleazy, smarmy enthusiasm to winning over all skeptics with much generous sincerity. This is a performance as pitch-perfect as it can get, ratcheting up the fireworks splendidly.
As does Hirani, who stirs up drama truly on a larger and even darker scale than he has done before, painting Sanju with the broadest strokes and yet the confidence of his approach drives the film forward with a swift thrust and steady pace that makes all the stakes so believable.
We see a doe-eyed Sanjay snort his first line of cocaine and then pounce impulsively at the challenge of lip-syncing, we are thrilled and delighted to see him hoodwink tough gangsters and we are equally roused and enthralled at him crusading his own cause through radio inside the walls of his prison. The filmmaker lets us glide through each of these pivotal incidents of his life, at times also pushing for unmistakably poetic and even poignant; in one particularly tender and crushing moment, the desperately addicted Sanjay hallucinates his mother breathing her last when in the real world, he was not even there to witness the same moment.
The frequently formulaic treatment, even as the film is well-shot and crisply edited, is undermined effectively by just how willing Hirani and Joshi are on occasion to probe into the darker gist of Sanjay's tale with brisk efficiency. Sanju does not shy away from the shattering severity of the actor's 'cold turkey' phase and bravely pumps up his ultimate redemption and it portrays the troubling facts of the allegations of his complicity in the 1993 serial bomb blasts with a reasonably grown-up seriousness.
The signature wisecracking humour is there, however, in spades but while some of it is perversely and even ruthlessly uproarious, it is nevertheless spiky and pointed given just how actually bamboozled was the actor in real life in his younger days. It also becomes Marx Brothers-like in its acidic punch; at one point, a drowsy and all-too-recognisable politician's apathy to Dutt's woes hits closer home than it seems.
This is, however, far from a perfect film. At heart, the script feels trapped between exploring the bigger picture of Dutt's successes and failures and looking inwards at his relationships and while it does a fair job of balancing both these facets, it falls short of being a bit more incisive.
The supporting cast is mostly well-picked but some of them are given surprisingly little heft. Anushka Sharma's pink-bobbed and blue-eyed non-fiction writer Winnie Diaz is essentially a retread of her earlier roles and while Manisha Koirala looks quite authentically weary yet striking as an ailing Nargis Dutt, the actress never quite gets the leg room to prove more of her mettle, though her smiling and bright-eyed presence does make us smile too.
A more serious-minded director would made it a full-fledged analysis of the harsher realities while a more irresponsible director would have been content to just sympathise. I am secretly glad that this did not happen. Instead, Hirani settles rather delightfully for the two key relationships of Dutt's life, one with his father, the domineering yet warm veteran actor Sunil Dutt and the trusty yet objective friend (I will come to him in a while).
Paresh Rawal is a bit of a misfire as Sunil Dutt and I am not referring to the absence of physical similarity but rather to how the otherwise talented actor plays it safe, bringing welcome warmth and wisdom to his patriarch but little individuality of his own. And while Hirani hands him and Sanjay several moving moments of genuine rapport, including the father reminiscing fondly about his memories and the son lapping them up absent-mindedly, the overall effect lacks a bit of the expected punch.
On the other hand, Vicky Kaushal plays Dutt's best friend Kamlesh with such gloriously reckless spontaneity that next to the impulsive, cocky leading man, he becomes Sanju's most endearing character. He bravely embraces the Gujarati stereotypes of his character arc and fleshes them with much effervescence and ernest charm and, also, becomes the moral compass of the film as we witness even the most pivotal proceedings through his perspective. And it was quite delightful to find the criminally under-utilised Sayaji Shinde after a long time.
In the end, even with the flaws and snags, Sanju is a Hirani film, warts and all, and it does make one smile more widely than ever as it hurtles towards its cheery yet refreshingly intimate climax that feels a more worthy celebration for Sanjay Dutt rather than his public acquittal from being defamed as a terrorist. As for the latter, even as the film does its share of whitewashing, it also makes uses it to make pointed stabs at the current miasma of fake headlines and tabloid reportage that lets cynicism prevail over hope. 'Don't you know it's gonna be all right?' this film seems to be crooning to the frenzied journalists so hungry on devouring up a public figure for his flaws without reporting the facts.
It is up to the incredible Kapoor to bring to life an equally incredible cinematic myth. He outdoes himself and delivers a portrayal that, like the film, is both larger-than-life yet intimate and ultimately heartfelt and, even like the best and most well-crafted propaganda cinema, surprisingly effective in end result. If Sanju appears too filmy to be real or believable, well then that was the case with the man himself.
My Rating: 4 Stars Out Of 5
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