Sam Bahadur: Meghna Gulzar crash course on how not to make a biopic, a dramatic reenactment of a Vicky-pedia page

One of the bigger disappointment of last year — cinema-wise, of course — was the relative disinterest that director Michael Mann’s Ferrari opened to. Reception out of Venice was mixed, and the film’s box office performance was arguably even more dispiriting than that of Mann’s last film, Blackhat. There was also an unspoken (and mildly morbid) fear that Ferrari might be Mann’s last film, considering how old he is, and how long he generally takes to put projects together. But despite everything, Ferrari has a strong chance of joining a small list of fellow films about tortured geniuses — Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs and Damien Chazelle’s First Man being the other two — that take a refreshingly unconventional approach to the biopic genre.

It was especially unfortunate, therefore, to watch director Meghna Gulzar reduce her latest film, Sam Bahadur, to essentially a dramatic reenactment of Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw’s Wikipedia page. Completely lacking a plot, or any sort of narrative thread for viewers to latch on to, Sam Bahadur is a uniquely bizarre experience. It isn’t terrible in the same way as Saina or Shabaash Mithu are terrible, but in entirely different ways altogether. Sam Bahadur takes a literal cradle-to-the-grave approach, which in Gulzar’s hands comes across less like a knowing acknowledgement of tropes and more like lazy writing.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that virtually every scene in Sam Bahadur could theoretically be the first. And because the movie goes through an interminable cycle of setting up new stakes every five minutes and then resolving those conflicts with the least amount of narrative heavy-lifting, it’s impossible to empathise with Sam. He’s played by Vicky Kaushal in a performance so exaggerated that it reduces India’s first Field Marshal to one of those Army uncles that scold random strangers on the street for dragging their feet, or for having poor posture.

Here’s the template in a nutshell: Sam is thrown into a new conflict at the start of every scene. These conflicts range from genuine, life-threatening danger in war zones to something as low-stakes as figuring out the dinner menu. Sam Bahadur is the kind of movie in which the Parsis talk about dhansak, while the sole Tamilian talks about sambar. In one scene, Sam finds himself in an Argo-like situation at an airport without any electricity. Forget eliciting basic thrills, the manner in which this mini-conflict is resolved is unintentionally funny instead. The Sam of this movie isn’t above theatricality, and he can’t resist making a grand show of his solution to the electricity problem. Almost like a magician, he seems to snap his fingers, and two parallel rows of previously unseen soldiers suddenly appear on either side of the runway, with flaming torches in their hands.

Sam Bahadur also reduces the entire plot of Christopher Nolan’s three-hour Oppenheimer to literally one scene. A jealous superior accuses Sam of being an ‘anti-national’, following which Sam is made to appear before a tribunal. The staging, structure, and performances in this sequence are truly farcical. Not a single member of the tribunal actually believes that Sam could be guilty; instead, they smirk to themselves at Sam’s witticisms. Sam himself is confident of his innocence, which is fine, but there is no uncertainty in his eyes as he handles this disrespect.

This scene encapsulates everything that is wrong with Sam Bahadur as a movie. Not only does it shrink what could have been a compelling story into essentially 10 minutes, you never actually believe that Sam could be in trouble. What you’re watching is a dry retelling of events; most definitely not cinema. Gulzar’s version of Sam is no different from a god. “Tumhe kisi mein problem nai dikhti, sab ache lagte hain,” his wife tells him in one scene. “Sab usse pyaar karte hain,” another character says about Sam later. How bland.

Compare this to the moral complexity that Mann brought to his portrait of Ferrari, a man whose quest for professional excellence is waylaid by his foibles as a human being. He has a secret second family, a son that he is reluctant to reveal to the world, and a grief so inexplicable that he can only express it to a tombstone. Steve Jobs in Boyle’s film was similarly walled-off, a character whose professional achievements were clouded by his determined refusal to acknowledge his illegitimate daughter. In First Man, Neil Armstrong developed an emotional armour so formidable after the loss of his infant child that it literally took him to the moon. And as one person on Twitter joked about Nolan’s blockbuster, men like Oppenheimer would rather almost destroy the world than seek therapy.

Sam Bahadur inspires neither jokes nor jubilation. It’s the least interesting way to make a biopic, and no amount of showboating by Kaushal is able to elevate the movie into something more engaging.