Midnight's Children

When I noticed this movie I didn't realize it was rushdie's movie/writing. Additionally when i saw the trailer it was portrayed to me as a coming of age for these kids during a unique time in history. However, what I got was a long story which revolves around these kids that were born during the exact moment of independence. A good premise but very bad execution. Underacted with potential storylines unexplored. The supernatural collection of these children that come together on occasion throughout the movie is the main plot of the story but wasn't compelling at all.

The plot is about several of children born around the first hour of India’s independence, the central character being Saleem Sinai (Satya Bhabha as adult, Darsheel Safary as 10 years old), who with others born around the midnight of 15th August 1947 possess special powers. (prophecy, magic, metamorphosis). They are the Indian X-Men, and they become the embodiment of the best hope of the two nations during a period of bad faith, violence and the betrayal of democracy. At the centre is a variation of Mark Twain’s ‘The Prince and the Pauper’: a rich boy and the son of a street musician are swapped at birth by the midwife (Seema Bishwas) who believes she is exercising benign social engineering; ‘the rich become poor and the poor rich’, as guided by her communist lover’s political ideology. The rest that follows is hastily and poorly done chronicle of Saleem’s life as it intertwines with the new independent life of India, with occasional visits from other ‘Midnight’s Children’ who are called for conference by Saleem (why always when he is sad or disturbed?), who has telepathic abilities, with the twitching of his remarkably large nose. In efforts to capture the true essence of the vastly detailed volume of a book, Mehta and Rushdie have, though possibly unintentionally, given the audience, who are occasionally thrown from scene to scene, a sense of the movie being crammed up hastily into the space allocated by conventional filmmaking without letting a chance for the people or the scenes sink properly. The sympathy doesn’t go to the characters or anything that happens; instead it is on the actors. The movie is not a waste altogether; the landscape of Kashmir has been captured gorgeously. The film is beautifully shot, with a real sense of colour, texture, settings and light. Mehta packs our ride with startling details that grasp our interests as we are whisked into decades. So solemnly I wish it were the same with the details in the plot. The film loses its way into the second half and dawdles; failing to justify it’s over two-and-half hours’ duration. All in all, ‘Midnight’s Children’ drags to its end without tracing its mark anywhere. A dull adaptation, ‘Midnight’ fails to ‘hit-the-spittoon’.