Jun 22, 2006 01:43 PM
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One of the ways you can criticize a work of art is to draw conclusions from what I choose to call - for the purposes of this review - the bottom-line statistic. This can be different for different art forms; for writers it is usually the number of copies sold, for painters it is the maximum amount your work can be auctioned for, for batsmen it is test-match average, and for an actor it is an amalgamation of the number of awards he wins and the number of hits he delivers. This is an instant-fix method, so to speak, intended for the layman, intended to give a quick but insightful summary of the artist’s talents.
There is another way which is monopolised by art critics, reviewers and laypeople who think they are either art critics or reviewers, with the last category ever increasing in population, especially on sites like these. This method involves ignoring the bottom-line statistic altogether and plunging into a discussion of abstract concepts and intangible theories. So we end up talking about the beauty of a Sachin Tendulkar on-drive, the eloquence of Dan Brown, the tenderness in the brush strokes of Leonardo Davinci, and the versatility of Shah Rukh Khan (or lack thereof). This process frees us from the dry, mechanical grip of statistics and science and lets us experience art as it was intended, from the heart of the artist through the lips of a critic.
These two methods are mutually exclusive, meaning that you can either choose the first or the second but not both. So my review, I solemnly promise, won’t use parameters like ‘hit’ or ‘flop’ or ‘number of awards’ to justify its position, which means it runs the risk of being more subjective than it can afford to be, but I guess you can’t have the best of all worlds.
It is widely accepted that an actor’s acid test comes from a measure of how versatile he/she is. It is strange, because not all arts demand this of their practitioners; writers usually stick to their own genre, none of the batsmen we know are adept at playing all shots equally well, and even painters usually cubby-hole themselves into nice well-labelled cocoons, but actors, for some reason have this rather unfair, and sometimes self-inflicted expectation to play as many different roles as possible. We don’t know why that expectation of versatility exists at all, but it is definitely there.
Which begs the question, versatility in what? Is versatility in roles enough? What if an actor, over the course of his career, has played every kind of role imaginable but in each of them his way of emoting is the same, he smiles the same way and his body language is the same? Does the fact that he has ‘attempted’ different roles mean he is a versatile actor? Clearly a demarcation needs to be made between versatility in roles and versatility in performance. The first doesn’t mean anything, yet that is what we often use when we judge our actors. The second, on the other hand, is what we actually mean when we say ‘versatility’, but because of the pitfall in our reasoning, we never actually get to that point.
So now having successfully jumped over the cleverly concealed hole, let us look at whether Aamir Khan is as versatile as he is made out to be. True, he has done different roles like Sarfarosh and Lagaan and what not, but has he acted differently? Is the Aamir you see in Sarfarosh different from the one you see in Lagaan, or Rang De Basanti for that matter? Do you get a sense of seeing a different person when you see these three films? When you go to a movie, you walk in with an expectation of how a specific actor is going to act. Has Aamir Khan ever performed contrary to your expectations? To put it in a nut-shell, has he ever surprised you with his emoting or diction or body language?
The same questions can be asked of Shah Rukh Khan as well, and I admit that he does not compare much favourably with Aamir. But, and this is a crucial but, there have been a couple of instances where I was caught off guard by Shah Rukh’s style. The first was his performance as the older Veer in Veer-Zaara; the all too familiar crooked smile was non-existent, his body language was something I had never seen before on him, and he spoke in a nice base voice several notches lower in pitch than his usual one. The second was his performance in Paheli as the original son of the businessman, not the ghost but the son which the ghost replaces. I had not seen him mumble to himself with a confused, disinterested expression on his face ever before, and I liked what I saw. Of course, he was back to his usual self both as the younger Veer and the ghost of Paheli, but in those two inconsequential, largely unnoticed roles, he managed to win me over, compared to Aamir at least.
If we apply the same questions we used on Aamir to Amitabh Bachchan, we see that even with him, there is a certain sameness to his style. When you think about Mohabbatein, do you remember Narayan Shankar or Amitabh Bachchan? When you think about Black, do you remember Debraj Sahai or Amitabh Bachchan? Was Narayan Shankar all that different from Debraj Sahai? But having said that, when I think Bemisaal I remember Adhir Roy (not Sudhir Roy, the character with the most screen time) and when I recall Chupke Chupke Parimal Tripathi flashes in front of my eyes; and then Amitabh Bachchan - an afterthought. When an actor sheds his identity to assume that of his character, it becomes immortal. Otherwise, it is just another character.
Perhaps no actor did that with as much ease (or apparent ease) as Naseeruddin Shah. Be it Anirudh Parmar the blind headmaster (Sparsh), Bhaskar Kulkarni the frustrated young lawyer (Aakrosh), Dr Anand who wants to unite his wife with her lover (Woh Saath Din) or the exuberant photographer Vinod Chopra (Jaane Bhi Do Yaro), Shah could not just play it, he could become it. You look for patterns in his acting, in his diction, in his gait, in his expressions but you find none. Dr Anand is as wooden as they come even as Vinod is as rib-tickling; Anirudh Parmar seemed to be pleading with you with those vacant, unseeing eyes. Forget multi-dimensional, Naseeruddin Shah can only ever be described fairly as dimensionless.
The answers to the questions posed in this piece will be different for different people, and you might not agree with me at all, but the least my review will have done is to point out what questions to ask, for very often it is at that juncture that most of us make a mess. So the next time someone asks you to choose between Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan, ask yourself the above questions and give them your answer. My answer? Well, Shah Rukh is definitely better than Aamir in the movies I have seen so far, but if Mars attacked tomorrow and I was asked to pick the best Bollywood actor there ever was to save the world, I will have no hesitation whatsoever in picking Naseeruddin Shah.
