Midnight's Children offers magic and mystery

By Elizabeth Hann
[associate copy editor]

There may be a month and a half left to go before the end of 2012, but I’ve already seen the film of the year, the front-runner in the race for Academy Award for Best Picture, the must-see. And the film in question is Midnight’s Children.

The backstory behind this film is almost as fascinating as the film itself. Midnight’s Children is an adaptation of the prizewinning 1980 debut novel of the infamous author Salman Rushdie. It has been adapted by controversy-courting Indo-Canadian director Deepa Mehta, with assistance from Rushdie himself. Since neither Rushdie nor Mehta felt safe working in India, the movie was filmed in Sri Lanka, with elaborately constructed sets and a cast of thousands.

All the above information is good to know, but the question remains – what is Midnight’s Children about? The plot of Midnight’s Children is extremely hard to summarize – and more than that, summarizing the story completely would almost ruin its startling power. Nevertheless, some kind of summary must be attempted. To put it roughly, Midnight’s Children tells the story of Saleem Sinai, a boy born at the stroke of midnight on August 14th, 1947 – the exact moment that India achieved independence from British colonial rule, and became a country in its own right. Saleem literally grows up with his country, and this fact weighs heavy on him. He grows up with an immense sense of destiny, and he discovers that, as a result of being born at such a mythic and momentous hour, he may – or may not – have magical powers.

This is not to suggest that the film is merely, or even primarily, a fantasy. Though it features magic, mysteries, Byzantine plot twists, and discursions into the stories of a dozen minor characters, Midnight’s Children is mostly a coming-of-age story on a grand, mythic scale. It traces not just Saleem’s coming-ofage, but the coming-of-age of India itself.

Midnight’s Children is a beautiful story, and it has been adapted into a beautiful film. The scenery in this movie is sometimes gorgeous (the Taj Mahal and other ancient temples), sometimes heartbreaking (Bombay slums, a forest clearing transformed into a bloody battleground) but always awe-inspiring. The cinematography, by Giles Nuttgens, is the best I have seen all year. Playing the central character, Saleem, from ages seventeen to thirty, newcomer Satya Bhabha (who previously appeared as the minor character Matthew Patel in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) conveys just the right air of amused bewilderment and fatalism for a character who grows up thinking he’ll be history’s conqueror and ends up being history’s pawn.

I said it at the start of this review, and I’ll say it again: Midnight’s Children is the film of the year, the film that deserves to win Best Picture, the must-see. It’s bold, beautiful, and above all brave movie, a film about India made by people who love and understand it from firsthand experience.