Family

Director: Rajkumar Santoshi

Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Akshay Kumar, Bhoomika Chawla, Aryeman, Kader Khan, Shernaz Patel, Gulshan Grover, Sushant Singh, Raza Muraad, Vivek Madan, Anjan Shrivastava, Bharati Achrekar

7/10

Rajkumar Santoshi’s Family ? Ties of Blood is about a powerful gangster (Amitabh) and his obsessive protectiveness of his family. It’s also, as title and tagline suggest, about familial bonds, feuding families, revenge, violence and tragedy.

At a basic level it’s yet another predictable film noir-ish sub-genre flick in much emulated tradition of Coppola’s Godfather prototype. But, then, Santoshi is a skilful storyteller (Ghayal, Damini, Khakee) within conventional Bollywood framework. And here, too, the director uses formula mainstream ingredients to ensure mass appeal. Strong, decidedly traditional moral values (romanticised notion of family), formulaic narrative structure (action, romance, melodrama, tragedy and comic relief) and most importantly ? sidelining all else in the film ? the towering indelible presence of Amitabh Bachchan, who literally holds it all together.

As we watch him as the suave, 60-something NRI don Viren Sahai in Family our minds fleet across his vast repertoire comprising a remarkable range of sympathetic outlaws in various avataars ? from angry young antisocial Vijay in Deewaar to aging underworld patriarch Nagre in Sarkar. And in his performance in Family we can actually see the trajectory of the iconoclastic, iconic Bachchan anti-hero ? evolved, morphed and matured with the thespian’s own age and experience; having shaped similar tailormade characters in screenplays especially written for him over the years .

And so in Family we don’t mind seeing him yet again as a good old bad guy whose love for his wayward son is his Achilles’ heel. Because even now years after Vijay, the underdog criminal ? who took to the bad life to provide a good life for his family ? first stole our hearts and our pointless self-righteousness; we’re still moved by purity of familiar familial emotions amid things going terribly wrong.

In the end, Viren learns that his ‘beloved’ son now wants him dead. The same son for whose ‘upbringing’ he’d actually entered the life of crime! In that telling climactic moment there’s cold, knowing dignity in his eyes that captures the entire arc of Viren’s development as a character, and also amazingly the entire graph of Bachchan’s journey as embodiment of such characters through three decades.

Mandira Mitra