Poignant in the middle Chris Knight
Hotel Mumbai takes on real-life tragedy in unshowy and efficient dramatization
It may sound insensitive, but the greater the devastation of an event — be it war, natural disaster or accident — the greater the narrative possibilities for the storyteller. If you’re going to make a based-in-fact account of the 1996 Everest tragedy, which claimed eight lives, you’d better get your facts defensibly straight. Take on the Titanic (1,503 dead) and you can add a sexy thirdclass passenger without drawing much notice.
The 2008 Mumbai attacks were, alas, more Titanic than Everest. Almost 200 people died when a group of terrorists staged attacks on a number of public buildings in India’s largest city, including a hospital, a Jewish community centre and a railway station. Anthony Maras’ directing debut, co-written with John Collee (Master and Commander, Happy Feet), focuses on the events at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, for reasons that may be viewed as cynical or practical.
Most cynical is the fact that the grand old five-star, built in the days of the Raj, provides a picturesque backdrop and a lot of western faces — although Dev Patel, a British actor of Indian descent, gets top billing as hotel staffer Arjun. But it’s also worth noting that while the attack at the train station was over in 90 minutes, the siege of the Taj lasted four days, which provides a better story arc.
Arjun embodies the quintessence of servitude that is, like it or not, a colonial holdover. When a clueless U.S. guest (Armie Hammer) tries to orders a hamburger in the restaurant, Arjun gently suggests a non-beef alternative. Hammer’s character, David, is at the hotel with his wife (Iranian actress Nazanin Boniadi), their newborn baby and nanny (Tilda Cobham-Hervey). When bullets start flying, they wind up in different places, and whether they’ll survive to reunite drives much of the story’s tension.
The sprawling cast means some of the characters remain little more than sketches, including the Australian backpackers who flee one attack in a café, only to wind up in the midst of another. And I wish we could have spent more time with Anupam Kher as Oberoi, head chef and a good man in a scrape.
Jason Isaacs gets a fair amount of screen time as Vasili, a brusque Russian businessman first seen ordering prostitutes. You wouldn’t want to spend a weekend with him — unless you were trying to survive a terrorist attack and cared more about survival skills than social niceties. Though sometimes he almost combines the two — what cognac to drink while under siege, for instance.
And the film handles the depiction of the perpetrators well, showing just enough of them so they register as more than mere monsters — one of them, wounded, calls his dad — without detracting from the victims’ plight. And there are some poignant moments of resistance, as when a receptionist held at gunpoint refuses to goad guests out of their rooms. Though it wouldn’t do to characterize the attack as having a happy ending, unless you happened to survive, which was often a random event.
Maras steers a middle course in telling this tale. Most of the deaths are neither off screen nor deliberately close up, and the cinematography is efficient and unshowy. But the physical layout of the hotel could be better portrayed: We know from dialogue that the CCTV room is on the second floor and the lounge-turned-panic-room is on six, but it’s otherwise difficult to tell where a given character is at any moment.
But you’ll never please everyone with a dramatization of history.
An Australian-Indian co-production, Hotel Mumbai won the audience prize at the Adelaide film festival, where it screened after its Toronto debut. According to imdb.com, it has not yet screened in India, which might be where reaction matters most.