Midnight’s Children
Directed by Deepha Mehta
Screenplay by Salman Rushdie and Deepa Mehta
Preview: Odeon Theatre, Nov. 1, 2012

Reviewed by Lynne Van Luven

I’ve always said that Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s 1981 book about India’s independence, is the best novel the author has ever written. So you’d expect me to come away from the movie unimpressed, wouldn’t you? Because the book is always superior to the movie?

I was eager to see the movie and wanted to love it. Midnight’s Children is lovely to look at, studded with accomplished Bollywood actors and moments of humour and pathos. But, after what felt like a very long time, I left the theatre feeling somehow manipulated, as if I’d seen a sanitized and too-carefully-handled version of Rushdie’s magic realism. The movie captured the events of the novel but recreated none of its spirit and power.

Perhaps Mehta and Rushdie tried too hard or were too enamoured of each other’s reputation? Perhaps the book’s sprawling timeline is too difficult to manage as a movie? But where the novel manages to capture the teeming vitality of India, of its independence from Britain and the partition that followed, the movie feels as shackled to linear narrative (despite Rushdie’s voiceover) as the book’s characters are “harnessed to history.”

The children born on August 15, 1947, at the stroke of India’s independence, have special powers, and they are the promise of the “new India’s future.” As current events in Pakistan and Bangladesh daily reinforce, that legacy has gone awry. At the heart of the movie lies the “switched at birth” trope: Nurse Mary (played by Seema Biswas) impulsively follows her activist lover’s dictum (“Let the rich become poor and the poor become rich”). She switches wrist tags on the heir of a bourgeois couple with those of the son of an itinerant street musician. So the poor child Saleem “steals the life” of the rich-born Shiva. Saleem (Satya Bhaba) grows up in comfort while Shiva (Siddharth Narayan) rages against his poverty and becomes an acclaimed soldier. Neither boy learns of the swap for many years, but it is Saleem’s magic gift – his ability to summon his midnight-born peers with a snort of his gigantic proboscis – that lifts the show from its torpor.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t see the movie – Zaib Shaikh from Little Mosque on the Prairie has a cameo role – but I won’t leap up and down and urge you to go. It’s not bad, and some might find it educational, a cross between a Knowledge Network feature and a Merchant-Ivory film.