The day when Mumbai police revelaed to the world the tap(p)ed audio recordings, over 60 hours of it, between Sanjay Dutt and the underworld, palling along like childhood chums, was the final straw in his already chequered life, when the tide of public sympathy, that he had been riding for so long, finally turned against him. The reactions from the film fraternity were swift and unequivocal....and frankly, very confounding. 'But he is only a child, in man's clothing', 'the guy doesn't even know the capital of the country, how could he be conspiring against it', 'Regardless, we are all behind him'. All understandable, when crores were riding on his films, some on the floors, some in the cans. His earlier brush with law was no less serious. Procuring an AK-56, allegedly for self-protection and his family's during the contentious period of Babri Majid's destruction and the subsequent riots and bomb blasts in Mumai, it was puzzling that he chose to consort with the seedier elements again to get his gun than lodge a formal complaint with the police claiming threats to his family and get an umbrella security. Film fraternity to the rescue once again, 'But he is only trying to protect his family, he never shot a bullet', 'Mere lapse of judgment', 'Stop judging his so harshly, the man had already been through enough'. The reason was simple again. Crores riding on him...on the floors...in the cans. And when out of the 5 years of sentencing he was handed down on a downgraded weapons charge instead of the more draconian terrorism charge, he was granted furloughs and paroles for the flimsiest of reasons that other prisioners could never dream of drumming up, whatever large hearted goonish charm he had completely wore off with the public, with organizations and opposition parties up in arms against the authorities treating him with kid gloves. 'But he is after all a kid, who never grew up', and that statement uttered by the revered and the feared Bal Thackeray, who picked and chose his targets that fitted his narrative at that time, than sticking with any kind of strong idelogy, good or otherwise. Mumbai is a strange city pushed and pulled in every which direction by tough cops, underworld, exploding economy, crushing poverty, migration, unemployment, regional politics, xenophobia AND SHIV SENA. Pin-balled through the consequences of these vagaries and vicissitudes of life in this vibrant city, was life of Sanjay Dutt whose happened to fall through and hit every ugly branch of the tree of life of Mumbai - money, drugs, women, mafia, riots and jail. It is very tough to feel sorry for someone who is privileged, despite weak-willed, was provided with every opportunity that money and fame could offer, and yet chose to trad his wares on the wrong side of the road. Sanjay Dutt didn't kill anyone, neither has he harmed anyone, all his battle scars were purely self-inflicted, yet he surely has dented the criminal and judicial system flashing his celebrity status and the good will of his parents, and that is the biggest reason why he lost the one thing his parents spent a life time earning - sympathy.
For a man who is single mindedly devoted to the cause of finding humanity (and then milking sympathy) in institutional injustices, Rajkumar Hirani this time chose a subject, whose humanity hardly shone through his public life, and still went through the motions of manufacturing sympathy from situations that could hardly be construed as institutional injustice (if anything, almost all the instiutions bent over backwards trying to shield and please their lovable 'baba'). Even when his first two Munna Bhai movies, one urging medicine to grow a heart and second preaching the public to love thy neighbor, succeeded and his next two, one about feeding the soul while educating the mind and second finding the God within, misfired, there still was a case to made that the subjects he picked up, education, religion and empathy - societal and institutional - lended themselves to be preached in his usually heavy-handed way (which got progressively worse). Which is why it is really baffling to see him select the life of Sanjay Dutt, which makes a case for wasted chances than anything else, to try his tricks of the trade on - an outsider fighting against a tyrranical system that is bent on destroying his humanity but eventually ends up rooting for him. That Dutt Jr's life is colorful, is an understatement, whether it is cinematic, however, is certainly debatable. The adversities he faced were of his own making, the enemies that he fought were all in his mind, and yet for Hirani to choose media, the toxic environment around, bad company as the reasons why Sanjay Dutt deserves audience's sympathy is laughable. More, to insert himself into the movie in the role of a "best biographer in the world" to try cracking the complex problem that is Sanjay Dutt's life (which it definitely is not by any stretch of the word or the concept) is the worst case of self-aggrandisement (a move borrowed from Charlie Kaufman's wildly inventive "Adaptation"). As one clearly awed and overwhelmed by the amount of twists and turns in Sanjay Dutt's life, Hirani looks past the other Dutt in Sanjay's house who truly deserves his own biopic - Sunil Dutt. For, here was a man who was battling his wife's terminal health, a son's widly careening life, his role as a parliamentarian for a constituency going through the worst of times, and above all, bearing the cross of a beaten father who relentlessly tried to be the apologist-in-chief to his son's crimes and misdeamanors, all this, while refusing to budge down to the circumstances or cow down to the situations. Now, THAT, is an exemplary life worth a projection and a picture, and not certainly of his son's, whose life is "interesting" at best, and indulgent, at worst. But for Ranbir Kapoor's spot on imitation of Sanjay Dutt (the best being the droopy eyes looks, with the eye balls hovering in the northern hemisphere), "Sanju"'s is a life best left untouched and untold.
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