The trouble with this adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Booker prize-winning Midnight’s Children, aside from the fact it is a mess and a muddle, is that it goes on and on and on and on. And on. And on. And then, just when you think it has to be over, it goes on some more. If it were up to me, I would charge film-makers for every minute — £1, say; let’s not be greedy — over 90 minutes that I’m kept in the cinema for no good reason. In this instance, as the film comes in at two and a half hours, I think I’m owed £60 (plus VAT and expenses) and I will be invoicing Mr Rushdie directly, as we cannot let him off the hook.
Rushdie has no one to blame for this but Rushdie. Rushdie wrote the script. Rushdie is the executive producer. Rushdie provides the narrative voice-over, which proves useful whenever the film paints itself into a storytelling corner, as it so often does. Rushdie is also, I have noted, on the poster, saying: ‘I am very proud of this film,’ which is a bit cheeky, considering the circumstances and that he owes me £60, plus VAT and expenses. Listen, no one is saying that bringing a 600-page magical realist epic about India’s transition to independence and Partition to the screen would be easy. (Heck, I tried just the other day, and had given up by elevenses.) But sometimes an author is not the best adaptor of their own work, and this is slow when it should be fast, fast when it should be slow, has the worst special effects of all time and fails to marshal its teeming subplots or characters. It is £60 too long, and feels longer. I’m thinking it even feels £96 too long.
As directed by Deepa Mehta, it starts engagingly enough.
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