A still from ‘Garudan’ 
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

After a brilliant makeover from a comedian to a lead actor in Vetri Maaran’sViduthalai: Part 1, Soori’s sophomore outing as a protagonist, Garudan, proves that his transformation is not a flash in the pan. With a neatly woven script that has enough brawn to overcome its minor shortcomings, director RS Durai Senthilkumar makes a splendid comeback with this raw and intense rural drama.

In Garudan, Soori plays Sokkan, an orphan who finds solace in Karunakaran’s (Unni Mukundan) solidarity, turning him into a living embodiment of the word ‘loyalty’. Meanwhile, Aadhithya (Sasikumar) is Karuna’s best friend and the duo also professionally works in tandem. Akin to a marksman’s deafening gunshot disturbing the tranquillity of a peaceful forest where its inhabitants keep their animal instincts in check, trouble brews in multiple forms. The film catalogues the rift in these bonds down to the proverbial ‘mann, ponn, penn’ (greed for land, wealth and women). When these events rattle his perfect world, Sokkan is forced to take it upon himself to restore balance.

A cop wants to resign, a minister wants to swindle away a large piece of temple land, a character from a once-affluent family has a hard time making ends meet, a couple is distraught about their inability to conceive, a relationship leads to unplanned pregnancy, a cordial relationship between two people blooms into romance…. Garudan discloses all its cards with breakneck speed and introduces us to a plethora of characters. While it takes a while to settle within this world, the screenplay goes against its title to put us amidst the action instead of giving us a bird’s eye view of happenings.

Soori is arguably at the cusp of his career’s apogee. At a stage where a little ‘mass’ would do wonders amidst a lot of ’class’ (three of his films are having a dream run at film festivals), the actor could not have asked for something as bespoke and vivifying as Garudan. Not only does the film play to his strengths and does a brilliant job with the ‘rise of an underdog’ trope that we enjoyed in Viduthalai, but it also gives him enough space to showcase his talents across aspects like action, romance and even a little dance.

A still from ‘Garudan’ 
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

But Garudan does not break boundaries with its plot; it offers the usual tropes of brotherhood, deception and retribution that we have seen often, and scenes do remind us of its own actors and director’s films like Kidaari, Subramaniapuram and Kodi. In fact, if Maamannan can be interpreted as the perspective of Vadivelu’s character Isakki from Thevar Magan, Garudan is the equivalent of Isakki taking it upon himself to end the feud with those he considers his bosses. However, despite looming over familiar territory, Garudan manages to give us something fresh thanks to its treatment and performances.

Director Durai etches the three primary characters brilliantly and it starts right from their very names; Aadhi is the all-giving do-gooder and a ray of hope from the above, Karuna takes in a nobody under his wings and values fellowship more than anything, and Sokkan — keeping with the title of the film — is the bird that lives between these two entities. Soori is picture-perfect as Sokkan; the character is often called a dog because he is faithful and dependable, but the same man’s best friend can turn rabid when pushed into a corner.

A character elaborates on a dream she had featuring horses, elephants and men with weapons; a scene straight out of the Kurukshetra War. But in this game of chess, what’s often overlooked is how a simple pawn, when it reaches the other extreme end, can transform into something powerful and Soori aces that transformation. His distinct monologue of truth bombs that he delivers to Karuna, the humourous side that often comes out during his escapades with lady love Vinnarasi (Revathy Sarma), his show of allegiance to the families of Karuna and Aadhi, and the impressive action sequences featuring him make for some of the best scenes in the film. Sasikumar also fits perfectly in the role of Aadhi, a dignified character who is an extension of several lead roles he has previously played. A pleasant surprise comes in the form of Sshivada pulling off her limited but salient character with poise. But what feels like a miscast is Unni Mukundan whose dialect does not help with his rushed character arc.

The film has its fair share of issues ranging from painfully convenient twists to unnecessarily gory and violent action scenes. Still, they end up as mere speed-breakers in an otherwise enjoyable joy ride. Add to it an in-form Yuvan Shankar Raja whose scores elevate the mood of the film and Arthur A. Wilson’s well-crafted frames, the technical prowess successfully push the film over the finish line. It would not be a stretch to call Garudan as director Durai’s best work, and leave you wanting more of this metamorphosis of Parotta Soori to protagonist Soori!

Garudan is currently running in theatres

When Ted Kaczynski killed himself in a federal prison last June, it closed a confounding chapter in the history of American domestic terrorism. Unlike fascists, white supremacists and antigovernment conspiracists, Kacyzinski espoused righteous principles: protecting the environment and facing the destructive role of technology. “[T]hreats to the modern individual tend to be MAN-MADE,” he wrote in a 35,000-word manifesto that ran in the New York Times and Washington Post in 1995. “They are not the result of chance but are IMPOSED on him by other persons whose decisions he, as an individual, is unable to influence.”

He wasn’t wrong. But the papers only published his words on the recommendation of the FBI and U.S. attorney general to prevent him from doing more harm — beyond the three people he’d murdered and nearly two dozen he’d injured with mail bombs.

Maxim Loskutoff’s second novel, “Old King,” is an attempt to sort through Kaczynski’s contradictions, to acknowledge the manifesto’s prophetic elements while stressing it’s the product of a sociopath. That’s fine fodder for a novel — the stuff of Dostoyevsky, even — though Loskutoff isn’t trying to deliver a “Karamazov”-grade philosophical tale. Rather, “Old King” is a more modest blend of police procedural and great-outdoors yarn.

Set largely in the Montana wilderness where Kaczynski holed up, the novel explores the line where independence becomes so distant from empathy that it’s toxic. Loskutoff writes beautifully about nature — “Old King” refers to a massive tree towering over the Montana landscape. But nature on its own, he observes, can be menacing and brain-scrambling as well.

Before Kaczynski claims the novel’s stage, Loskutoff introduces a set of characters who evoke his crisis in miniature. In 1976, Duane is a young father who has just left his marriage and home in Utah to move to Lincoln, Mont., for work. He’s not especially skilled, and nature alienates him at first. (“Branches rustled, reaching toward him, offering up his failures.”) But he soon lands a logging job and gets to know the locals: Mason, a forest ranger; Hutch, owner of an ad hoc animal rescue; the Carter family, a clan of cranky separatists; and Jackie, Mason’s ex and a diner waitress. Settling in, Duane gifts Jackie with a microwave he liberated from his broken marriage, a small symbol of both warm domesticity and cold technology.

Indeed, it’s likely no other microwave in the history of American literature has been asked to carry so much metaphorical weight. Even without dwelling on the device, it’s clear that everybody in the area is trying to figure out to what degree they can balance the wilderness’ capacities for wonder and alienation. Mason, the ranger, is the most sophisticated thinker on the matter, questioning whether his job is preserving the environment or helping to accelerate a land rush: “By arresting poachers and running old trappers out of business, he’d clear the way for rich tourists to build second homes… Their contracting crews killed animals by the score with bulldozers, and the cement they poured left no way for the trees to grow back.”

Maxim Loskutoff, author of “Old King.”

(Cinna Cuddie)

As the narrative moves into the ’80s, Mason is increasingly troubled by the irony of his work. Duane, meanwhile, acknowledges the healthy fear the environment puts in him: Seeing a grizzly, he falls into a “wild, plunging panic, as if he’d come here to be eaten, having finally crossed the line between civilization and his dreams.” Both responses qualify as a kind of wilderness intelligence. By contrast, Kaczynski, a brilliant mathematician before becoming the Unabomber, is rendered as a more crazed, lunkheaded type: “The bear was the first real killer he’d ever encountered. He wanted to be a killer.”

There’s an unwritten law that literary fiction set in the high plains be sturdy and simple — sentences firm as fence posts, commas hammered in as clean as barn nails. Kent Haruf’s novels are the exemplar of the form, but the sensibility runs through books by Thomas McGuane, Marilynne Robinson, Peter Heller, Ivan Doig and more. Loskutoff, who set both his novel “Ruthie Fear” and story collection “Come West and See” at least partly in Montana, has mastered his own take on the form. He deftly captures how the environment is both enchanting and fearsome, and though his set pieces have a familiar ring — bar fights! dangerous animals! — he focuses more on what’s troubling his characters than overselling some myth of rough-and-ready swagger.

Still, the plainspoken approach means some characters lack depth. Jackie, the waitress, rarely rises above the trope of the straight-talking done-wrong Western woman who can’t find a good man. The trouble is more acute in Kaczynski’s case. Luskatoff introduces a postal inspector, Nep, who’s trying to chase down the Unabomber and grasps the threat he poses to America’s sense of self, then and now. (“Race riots, serial killers, assassinations, superfund sites. The great ship of America going down with all the lights blazing.”) But Nep is basically a stock detective, and Kaczynski little more than an angry narcissist who derides everyone around him as fools. His contempt for humanity is clear. But then why was he concerned for it?

For Loskutoff’s purposes, Kaczynski serves less as a character than a warning. The Unabomber was more than a ’90s headline; his past is closer to our present than we think. When a Montana local tells Mason about a brutal act of violence that happened in the ’20s, Mason brushes it off: “That was fifty years ago.” The man scoffs: “You think that’s a long time?”

Mark Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”

Cricket and marriage get into an awkward tangle in Mr & Mrs Mahi, a sports melodrama that hinges on action on the field of play and plenty of reaction off it, mostly in the realms of a relationship that runs into tricky terrain.

The Sharan Sharma-directed film is about sport but it segues into a tale of marital discord when thwarted ambitions collide with suppressed emotions. The narrative is unusual to say the least but the treatment is devoid of any major departures from norm.

A man who has never had it easy resolves to help his wife revive and hone the rough-and-ready batting skills she acquired as a girl playing tennis ball cricket with the neighbourhood boys.

Rajkummar Rao and Janhvi Kapoor play the two cricket fanatics who become life partners. When the man fails to earn himself a second chance to make it big as a cricketer, the duo decides to channel their energy and experience into catapulting the lady, a diffident junior doctor in a Jaipur hospital, into the game’s big league.

Produced by Zee Studios and Dharma Productions and written by Sharan Sharma and Nikhil Mehrotra – the combination that created Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl – Mr & Mrs Mahi is, at best, a moderately engaging film that struggles with inconsistent pace.

It is simplistic and superficial in its exploration of sporting achievement and its personal and public spinoffs seen in the context of their repercussions on an apparently happy marriage of two amiable individuals with unresolved daddy issues. The film’s central emotional nub feels stretched.

The story is about a girl is coerced by her dad to give up cricket in order to prioritise her medical education, but the film revolves primarily around the man she marries. The latter is a failed cricketer forced by his domineering father to stop playing the game and join the family’s sports goods shop.

The two dour daddies, played by Kumud Mishra and Purnendu Bhattacharya, are the principal hurdles that Mahendra Agarwal and his wife Mahima Agarwal nee Sharma – the two names are abbreviated to Mahi – have to surmount as they seek to break free from familial shackles.

Cricket gives them courage and binds them but it also threatens to tear them apart. Their fight for freedom and fulfilment also involves coming to terms with success and the rewards that if offers by way of fame and recognition. Coached by her husband, Mahima makes rapid strides and wrests a spot in the Rajasthan women’s team.

With a mix of cross-batted strokes, orthodox off drives and cheeky switch-hits, the lady grabs her chances and quickly overshadows Mahendra. As she basks under the increasing media spotlight, the husband sulks and grumbles. He feels he deserves to be feted as a successful talent-spotter.

Mr & Mrs Mahi, at least parts of it, might have worked better had it stuck to a comic vein of the kind that it strikes when a disgruntled Mahendra makes reels to apprise the world of his role in the late-blooming Mahima’s rapid ascent.

Mr & Mrs Mahi never rises above the humdrum although it does have elements that render it passable as a relationship drama set against the backdrop of cricket.

For one, it does not subject the audience to the incessant babble of blabbermouth commentators and the shrieks and shouts of roaring spectators to drive home the ‘rousing’ impact of the sporting action on the screen.

The film falls back instead on-field chatter and an excitable coach’s instructions from beyond the boundary line as devices to ratchet up the drama and provide additional information on Mahima’s hits and misses.

Because the film focuses on the exploits of a single player, all the others, members of Mahima’s team as well as her opponents, are mere adjuncts thrown in to provide her with a platform to demonstrate her wares.

Off the field, Mahima is demure and tentative. On it, she is dynamite. She has a swing at every delivery that she faces. Hitting fours and sixes comes easy to her. If the ball is in the slot, I hit, she says. She gets struck by bouncers a couple of times. To be sure, she is down but never out.

But no matter how desperately the film tries, the excitement isn’t as intense and infectious as it is intended to be. It is way too easy to anticipate how things will turn out for Mahima and her husband who has a thing or two to prove to his doubting dad. That takes a great deal of the fun out of the proceedings.

The lead actors do their bit to keep us invested in the narrative and the emotions of the two principal characters. Rajkummar Rao, always on an even turf, delivers Mahendra’s recriminations, some directed at his father, others at his wife, with conviction even when the lines that the character speaks are riddled with self-pity.

Janhvi Kapoor’s Mahima does a good job of swaying between indecisive and assertive. She wields the willow like a plucky pro all right, but the marital pulls and pressures that she has to deal with lessen the female power that she is supposed to represent.

Mahima is projected as a lady whose fate is always in the hands of the men in her life – her father, her husband and the women’s team coach, whose impulsive ultimatums keep her on her toes. For the most part, she plays along, resigned to her lot.

When she eventually musters the gumption to say mujhe tumhari madat nahi chahiye (I do not need your help), one cannot but wonder why it took her so long to come to that decision.

That, in a sense, sums up Mr & Mrs Mahi. The film makes the right noises but not before putting the female protagonist through a grind devised by the men around her. And finally, it is not her dad but her husband’s father who has got to be mollified. The girl achieves a great deal but she can be happy only if her hubby and his dad are happy.

What the film conveys is that the female Mahi is incomplete without the male one. The conflicting and convoluted messaging is a mishit that lands nowhere. The result is a feeble gender equality tale that plods its way, exhaustingly at times, to a rather predictable end.