Film Review: Midnight's Children

The adaption of Midnight's Children needs magic.

Midnight's Children

Director: Deepa Mehta

Cast: Satya Bhabha, Shahana Goswami, Shabana Azmi, Siddharth, Rajat Kapoor, Shriya Saran, Charles Dance

THIRTY-TWO years after its publication made its author an international superstar, Salman Rushdie's epic, rambunctious, brilliant novel comes to the screen. Politics scuppered an attempt to make a miniseries adaptation of "the Booker of Bookers" in the 1990s but after a recent meeting between Rushdie and Indian-born Canadian filmmaker Mehta, the film adaptation was fast-tracked. Now, with far less fanfare or hype than you might expect, it is here and it is, for fans of the novel, a disappointment.

Yes, not all authors adapt their own work and no, not all adaptations of their own work by authors are failures, but here Rushdie's involvement seems to be to the detriment of the final product.

Not only is he the screenwriter, but he also assumes narrator duties, sucking the life out of his own words and delivering them in a flat, ponderous tone that doesn't match their original spark on the page.

Deciding to jettison the forwards-backwards-jump-through-the-past-from-the-present structural play of the novel in favour of a linear format, the film traces the fortunes of Saleem Sinai (Bhabha), the bastard child of a beggar and Shiva (Siddharth), the only child of a wealthy Muslim couple.

The two children were born at the stroke of midnight on August 15 1947 (the moment of India's independence) and swopped at birth by a midwife influenced by her communist husband's notions of social engineering.

Over three decades, the boys, together with the rest of the "midnight's children", find themselves pitted on different sides of the major conflicts that will shape the history of India, leading up to the state of emergency under Indira Gandhi in the 1970s.

The problem is that the grand sweep and ambitions of the novel, with its pop culture references and sly winks to the rich culture of India and its people, were always going to be difficult to film.

At just under two-and-a-half hours, Mehta's film feels as if it is trying to pack too much into too little space.

It would have been better as a miniseries but as a film, while it is strong on the family relationships, it is weak on the bigger picture. The juxtaposition of the personal and the political, which served the novel so well, is lost thanks to a structure that isn't hardy enough to carry it through.

It needed a little more bombast, more magic and more charm, and while Rushdie is a well-known and eloquent film buff, he hasn't managed to translate the novel into the film we wished for.