Movie Review of Tare Zameen Par. Review on Taare Zameen Par

Director – Aamir Khan

Screenplay – Amol Gupte and Deepa Bhatia

History

Dyslexia is a neurological deficiency in which a person’s brain has difficulty in processing written and/or verbal language. It is not an intellectual disability and neither is a person mentally retarded. Some of the world’s famous people who had dyslexia were, Albert Einstein, Tom Cruise, Agatha Christie, Jay Leno, Anthony Hopkins, Richard Branson and John Irving.

Plot

Ishaan(Darsheel Safary) is a day dreaming 9 year old  kid who would rather spend time painting and observing fishes in the pond and with his pet dogs rather than studying and playing with kids of his own age. He can not concentrate on his studies and keeps getting poor scores in school. When he reads, the letters get all mixed up and he has difficulty in writing and even gets mixed up with numbers. Corporal Punishment at school and equally strict supervision at home by his mother(Tisca Chopra) and father(Vipin Sharma) makes Ishaan more and more bitter towards the world and almost takes him towards a depressive mode. The only person who is keen to support him is his elder brother, Yohan(Sachet Engineer). The straw that breaks the camel’s back is when Ishaan submits a false absent note to his teacher to skip his class and that is found out by his father. His father then buts him in a boarding school in Panchgini where the rules are more strict than what it was in his school. Then comes a new Art Teacher, Ram Nikunj(Aamir Khan) who discovers that Ishaan is not a normal child but suffering from dyslexia. He convinces the principal of the school to let him study with the normal students and gives him extra attention and special training to make sure Ishaan passes his exams.

Critic’s Comments

There are very few movies made for children or who have children in the main lead. The last such film I can think is Mahesh Bhatt’s Zakhm way back in 1998. An issue based movie is hardly made in India and Aamir Khan has broken all the norms by deciding to make his directorial debut with such a drastically different film and kudos to him and his creative team of writers, Production Designer, Shruti Gupte, Researcher Deepa Bhatia and writer and creative director Amol Gupte for making such a fine film. The story is clichéd. Some of the characters are slightly exaggerated but all in all this is a must watch film for all film lovers. Darsgeel Safary has given a very good performance. If this was Hollywood, he would have got nominated for the best actor award and Aamir for the Best Director, Film and Supporting Actor. It also takes lots of guts for an actor of Aamir’s caliber to be in a supporting role and give all the limelight to a 9 year old kid, and that too in his directorial venture. Very well made film. Please don’t give this a miss. The best scene of the movie comes, and shows how good Aamir Khan is as an actor, when he goes to meet Ishaan’s parent’s for the first time.

Psst -

1)      

A couple of weeks before the film was released, Aamir Khan had undergone some major personal problems. His brother, Faisal Khan, who had paranoid schizophrenia, was given custody to his estranged Father Tahir Hussain by the High Court. This, despite both Faisal and Tahir Hussain having financial disputes. A couple of day’s before the film release, Tahir decided to let go of Faisal to Aamir but Faisal decided to live independently.

2)      

Another controversy surrounded Aamir when he publicly criticized, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s 2005 hit Black and that the issue of dealing with special children was not treated right and the way a special child was shown treated in Black was not right and was sending false message to everyone. He also mentioned on his personal website that he has the highest regard for Amitabh Bachchan as an actor and Sanjay Leela Bhansali as a director but there were bound to be creative differences. He wanted to meet Amitabh Bachchan to clear any integrity doubts but Amitabh refused to give him time for meeting. It was later learnt that Amitabh was infact with his mother in the hospital, who passed away on the day the film released.

3)      

Another controversy surrounding the film was that of directing the film. Originally Amol Gupte was to direct the film with Aamir Khan in the lead cast and a producer. There were creative differences and Aamir initially decided to back out but Amol decided to back out and remain as a writer and Aamir decided to produce and direct. He has mentioned in the official film site that all the pre-production work and the script belonged strictly to Amol Gupte.

4)      

Most of the paintings seen in Darsheel’s room and the final painting of the Art Competition were done by Amol Gupte.

5)      

The green signal for showing Abhishek Bachchan’s picture in the movie as a reference for someone who had dyslexia was given by Amitabh and Abhishekh Bachchan despite the cold war between Aamir and Amitabh.

6)      

For your general knowledge only, Aamir Khan and Albert Einstein share the same birthday.

Quotes

1)      

"Aap mujhe symptoms bata rahey hai, bimari ka karan nahi.”

2)      

“Apney armaano ko inkey bachchey se pura karma chahtey hai. This is worse than child labour.”

Oops-

1)      

When Aamir Khan say’s that Ishaan is suffering from dyslexia because he keeps writing his letters upside down or backwards, is not entirely correct. Although Darsheel shows full symptoms of a dyslexic child, the above symptoms are not the correct ones as that of a dyslexic affected person. A dyslectic would usually mix up the letters B and D and would suffer from short term memory skills. They would never have the ability to write the letters in reverse or upside down. That would also ensure that Leonardo da Vinci was not a dyslexic as most depicted in the movie.

2)     

In the movie, despite going to an English medium school, we see that the Maths Teacher spoke in Hindi in the class. Also its very unlikely that a strict Boarding School whose medium of teaching was English would have the final speech made by the principal in English although Aamir speaking in hindi would have been ok considering that he was an Art Teacher and had different way of teaching students.

3)        **It would have been very easy to find out that Ishaan had skipped class as he was present in the first period and skipped class in the subsequent period. In a school, this would have been impossible to find out. Specially when all Indian schools have people guarding the school gates during the time classes a