Film Review: Sanju

Sanju is a rather odd beast. It’s a biopic based on a famous – and still working – Bollywood movie star, Sanjay Dutt, as it chronicles his well publicised internal and external struggles, and his path to redemption. And it’s directed by the guy who took part in changing the general public’s perception of him back in the early 2000s. There’s no Hollywood equivalent of something like this that I can think of, but it’s quite the story no matter where you’re from.

The film takes those internal and external struggles and divides the movie into two parts focusing on each individually. The first half of the film mostly revolves around Sanjay Dutt (portrayed by Ranbir Kapoor) grappling with drug addiction that came as a result of dumb choices informed by being a product of nepotism – his parents are Bollywood royalty, Sunil Dutt (Paresh Rawal) and Nargis (Manisha Koirala) – which plays almost like an Indian riff on Wolf of Wall Street. The second half takes on a different kind of struggle as a series of events lead Sanjay to being labeled as a terrorist because of his possession of arms given to him by people connected to the 1993 Bombay Bombings, and him fighting to prove his innocence.

Two things hold these divided sections in place. One is a framing device involving Winnie Diaz (Anushka Sharma), a writer who Sanjay is hoping to hire in putting together an autobiography, which can maybe set things straight. It’s the stories in these moments between her and Sanjay or certain supporting character where we go into flashbacks to find out various truths about his life. The second thing is a throughline centered on the rocky relationship between Sanjay and his father. Sanjay grappling with being in the shadow of his parents’ legacy is often what leads him to make terrible decisions, and his inability to cope with his mother’s eventual death of pancreatic cancer, which only puts an additional wall between the two.

The film is co-written, edited, and directed by Rajkumar Hirani, who has become one of the more successful Bollywood filmmakers in recent memory, having made a number of crossover hits like 3 Idiots and PK. Above all things that you can say about him, he is – at heart – an unabashedly populist filmmaker (which actually applies to most Bollywood filmmakers, but he’s especially good at it), and it often seems like that impulse gets in the way in moments when it should’ve been more raw. However, he still keeps things moving, and he keeps things colorful, and vibrant, and he knows how to work with his actors. I especially like how the first half commits to some dark ideas and isn’t afraid to make Sanjay come across as an unlikable bastard. Some of the structural choices are a tad clunky, often flashbacks will go on so long I forget they’re flashbacks, and find myself briefly confused when it cuts away.

There is a bit of a drop in the second half that I don’t think it fully recovers from. I applaud the first half for being seemingly honest about Sanjay’s problems with drugs, and his various failures in trying to get clean, and how that affects his relationship to the people around him. But once we get into the whole terrorism charges, the film takes an odd turn as it begins shifting away from the more personal angle of the first half, and making it about Sanjay essentially proving everyone – the media especially – wrong. It takes on a weird anti-journalism stance, with these intense smear campaigns taking any and all opportunity to tear down Sanjay’s reputation. Granted, this is speaking as someone who has no real knowledge of how the news industry in India operates compared to here in America. I’m sure there are nuances that I’m missing, but it is nuance that the film never offers, and speaking as an American the proclamations of “fake news” in the second half of the film can’t help but feel troubling considering the way that narrative has played out here with recent events such as the shooting at the Capital Gazette in Maryland occurring mere days ago. It’s with this second half that you remember that this is a film that could only be made about someone while they are still alive and hold some clout. If it weren’t for the strong throughline of the father-son relationship, the second half might’ve sunk the entire thing.

So, while there are some issues the film has as a narrative, where it really succeeds is at being a performance piece for Ranbir Kapoor. He really transforms into Sanjay in astonishing ways, and the way he captures Sanjay’s particular physicality is incredibly impressive. There’s a song that plays during the credits where you see the real Sanjay Dutt and Ranbir Kapoor, without the extensive makeup, and it’s there you get to see how the two really don’t look or move alike, making the performance even more astonishing in retrospect. The cadence of his voice, the way he walks, his bulky upper body, it’s a complete transformation. It’s the kind of performance that a movie like this needs to succeed and Kapoor was more than capable.

In fact, he’s so good the rest of the cast doesn’t quite get the chance to even come close to what he’s doing. They are all pretty good, though. Paresh Rawal obviously gets the a number of moments to shine, and he’s wonderful. Everyone else basically delivers what you’d expect. Well, everyone except all the non-Indian cast members who – even with having to deliver one or two lines – are uniformly terrible. But that’s kind of par for the course when it comes to Bollywood.

Sanju starts off interesting, but devolves into something of a hagiography that sacrifices meaningful complexities for simple, crowd-pleasing moments. Even with those flaws, it at least remains an intimate story instead of a Bollywood in-joke fest like Om Shanti Om, and while It’s certainly rough around the edges, it works where it matters the most. The central performance by Ranbir Kapoor is one of the more impressive turns I’ve seen this year, and he brings humor, vulnerability, and empathy to a larger-than-life figure. I’m not entirely convinced that it’s the most accessible film to people not familiar with the actor and the basics of his life, but if you are, it’s a fascinating and entertaining watch.