Midnight's Children (2013)
Average Rating: 5.6/10
Reviews Counted: 43
Fresh: 19 | Rotten: 24
Though Midnight's Children is beautiful to look at and poignant in spots, its script is too indulgent and Deepa Mehta's direction, though ambitious, fails to bring the story together cohesively.
Average Rating: 5.5/10
Critic Reviews: 14
Fresh: 4 | Rotten: 10
Though Midnight's Children is beautiful to look at and poignant in spots, its script is too indulgent and Deepa Mehta's direction, though ambitious, fails to bring the story together cohesively.
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Movie Info
At the stroke of midnight on August 15th, 1947, as India declares independence from Great Britain, two babies are switched at birth by a nurse in a Bombay hospital. And so it is that Saleem Sinai, the bastard child of a beggar woman, and Shiva, the only son of a wealthy couple, are fated to live the destinies meant for each other. Over the next three decades, Saleem and Shiva find themselves on opposite sides of many a conflict, whether it be because of class, politics, romantic rivalry, or the
Cast
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Satya Bhabha
Saleem Sinai -
Shahana Goswami
Mumtaz/Amina -
Rajat Kapoor
Aadam Aziz -
Seema Biswas
Mary Pereira -
Shriya Saran
Parvati -
Siddharth
Shiva -
Ronit Roy
Ahmed Sinai -
Rahul Bose
General Zulfikar -
Charles Dance
William Methwold -
Kulbhushan Kharbanda
Picture Singh -
Anupam Kher
Ghani -
Darsheel Safary
The 10-year-old Saleem -
Soha Ali Khan
Jamila -
Zaib Shaikh
Nadir Khan -
Samrat Chakrabarti
Wee Willie Winkie -
Shabana Azmi
Naseem -
Sarita Choudhury
The Prime Minister -
Shikha Talsania
Alia -
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Salman Rushdie
Narrator -
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All Critics (43) | Top Critics (14) | Fresh (19) | Rotten (24)
There are enough intermittent passages of power and beauty to get you through the slow spots.
Top CriticA pretty but staidly linear epic drained of the novel's larkish, metaphorical sweep, and a collection of multi-generational love stories lacking their originally eccentric, fizzy charm.
Mehta has given us something as pale as it is panoramic.
Rushdie's characteristic antic humor animates the family scenes, but the movie gets bogged down in endless plot convolutions and whimsy (the material would have worked better as a TV miniseries).
In its steady great-books way, the film is often truthful and moving.
A movie that, if never exactly dull, feels drained of the mythic juice that powers the book, which won the Booker Prize in 1981.
Rushdie adeptly trims his sprawling tale down to a still-substantial 2 1/2-hour movie, which only occasionally seems to hurry.
Stirring, beautifully filmed and highly personal history of India does right by Salman Rushdie's celebrated novel.
Both dreamy and dramatic, a fascinating view of Indian history seen through the prism of a personal story.
An ambitious film conveying the complicated and violent early history of India and Pakistan through the stories of two boys born on independence day.
Overproduced.
Deepa Mehta's respectful approach to the material may meander and simplify, but it gradually gains in emotional power, building into a moving account of a man whose many experiences mirror the growing pains of an independent India.
Preserves much of the novel's intricacy and human drama, perhaps due to Salman Rushdie's involvement as co-screenwriter, even if it remains singularly unremarkable from a cinematic perspective.
With an over-written screenplay and far too much material for audiences to digest, this film proves the rule that authors shouldn't adapt their own books into movies.
Considering Midnight's Children is bound up in notions of identity, it is faintly disastrous that this adaptation should be so lacking in one of its own.
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April 25, 2013:
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Foreign Titles
- Mitternachtskinder (DE)
...but somewhere on the way to the screen, Salman Rushdie collaborating with director Deepa Mehta on adapting his own novel leaves behind much of the fantasy which made the book such an intriguing read about the midnight's children, the closer those born to midnight of independence day in 1947, the greater their special abilities, with an emphasis on the rivalry between Saleem Sinai(as a boy, Darsheel Safary, later, Satya Bhabha) and Shiva(Siddharth), both born exactly at midnight in the same hospital. Said fantasy would have definitely helped with the above allegory. Instead, the movie takes forever to get started(mind the generalization but I am beginning to suspect that everybody in India has a romantic tale of how their parents or grandparents met and fell in love) while keeping some details that are not exactly relevant to the larger story.