'Decoupled' review: R. Madhavan and Surveen Chawla are fine, but the script treats them like they’re ten years old

Surveen Chawla and R. Madhavan in 'Decoupled'. (Image: screen grab)

When Gwyneth Paltrow announced on Goop that she and her husband of ten years Chris Martin were ‘consciously uncoupling and yet coparenting their two kids’, there was a huge backlash and people laughed at this ridiculous description of their divorce. It trivialises the experience that deeply disturbs not just the couple but their kids too. Now Netflix attempts to give us the eternally gorgeous R. Madhavan and the pretty, funny, talented Surveen Chawla (you saw her as Jojo Mascarenha in Sacred Games and in Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly) as a couple on the brink of a divorce but tiptoeing about the subject around their young daughter.

Wrong assumption. Kids of today cannot be treated like they’re stupid and and blind. Kids have friends who have single parents, and they can see that gigantic invisible precipice between the two parents. Kids do get caught in the crossfire when parents bicker and fight over the custody of children, and we have seen spectacular movies about the subject from War of the Roses to Mrs Doubtfire. But puhleeze! That was 1989 and 1993, respectively.

Decoupled has some funny moments, and I must admit the sarcasm is spot-on: ‘Is it some 45-year-old golfer who thinks he has a great way of delivering shit food?’ But these moments are few and far between.

Maddy plays a pulp fiction writer Arya Iyer who is supposedly sarcastic and witty (translation: he has a runaway tongue like that of a precocious child) and Surveen is Shruti Sharma who is a star in a VC firm called Fountainhead. Now Shruti seems like she has her head screwed on right when she says she needs to inform her daughter and family about their ‘change in status’ (like who in 2021 will announce that on Facebook!) but suddenly behaves like a vicious person when she gets Maddy beaten up (literally and figuratively) at a lit fest by not telling Maddy he’s not interviewing eunuchs but maids on stage. That, too, when the child and her parents are in the audience. Doesn’t come across as funny at all.

Madhavan telling off a Netflix person to ‘order food before you visit the restroom’ because she may not have taken a dump before she left Bombay, had not used the loo at the airports, and now that she’s in a fancy Delhi club she will take longer than ‘a couple of minutes’ is not funny or sarcastic at all. It’s plain rude. Writers have been kicked out of pitch meetings for less. Netflix does itself injustice by actually showing the executive agreeing to meet him again. And giving him a show that has a terrible unoriginal idea. There’s a TV channel that does a walk-the-talk show of candid conversations that’s as old as the hills. And the guru they choose for this show is so bad, it’s obvious the writer has never done any kind of guru shopping at all. Even the lowliest of the gurus will not meet you in a public coffee shop (where Hare Krishna men walk in to eat, and they wouldn't be caught dead eating here). The show falters here big time. Meetings with gurus are held at the homes of their richest bhakts, gurus are showing up at World Economic Forums these days…

Madhavan getting on a no-fly list, not wanting to shake hands with teenage boys, suspecting waiters of scratching themselves, is just badly done. Even mild germaphobes know how to fake sneezes into their hands which will put off anyone… Heck, germaphobes in real life do not accept change from auto rickshaw guys because you never know where the change has been. And they wouldn't touch books at bookstores, let alone swap the bestsellers because that’s how they are.

Surveen Chawla, to her credit, rolls her eyes really well. She tries to douse the fires set by her stupid husband who has no social skills at all. But apart from that one spark of intimacy (the reason why ‘that’ photo on her parents’ home) you wonder why she puts up with someone who is as graceless as Arya Iyer.

Speaking of changing the order of best selling books in a bookshop, brings me to the funniest and yet stretched rivalry between Madhavan and none other than Chetan Bhagat. It was bad enough that Chetan Bhagat’s stand-up act wasn’t funny (Sunny Leone was funnier, and that show is on Amazon Prime Video), but when you have to say that Chetan Bhagat is the funniest part of Decoupled, that’s saying something about the show. Much to my delight, Chetan Bhagat shows up as himself, and the writer of the show should not take credit for Chetan Bhagat’s line: ‘I’m not the best writer, I’m a best selling writer’. The rivalry between Chetan Bhagat and Madhavan’s No.2 status is truly very funny, but then feels repetitive.

I admire Netflix for trying to expand their India content to include urban stories, but Decoupled - in spite of the Madhavan gorgeousness - is like that refried samosa at a multiplex. When you have Minnal Murali and The Silent Sea on Netflix’s ‘coming soon’ list, you can happily, consciously uncouple from this one…