Goodbye review | Neena Gupta plays the most iridescent part in this film about grieving

Amitabh Bachchan and Rashmika Mandanna in 'Goodbye', which releases in theatres on October 7, 2022.

What happens during the days that follow the death of a parent or close kin? Stuff of nightmares, for those inexperienced; painful reminiscence for the experienced. But there’s a slightly distant third perspective. The one that can observe the humour springing off the gloom that pervades a family or a community after a death—and the accompanying sobbing, sulking, wincing, fidgeting, bickering and groaning in the aftermath human drama. Vikas Bahl’s Goodbye, which he has also written, is one such perspective.

Effective in its most emotional moments despite an overall melodramatic tone, and pleasing in it stance on Hindu ritualism, Goodbye re-emphasises in certain scenes the Baghban (2003) take on what traditional Indian society—and by extension Bollywood traditionally—has considered the moralistic pitfalls of not being attentive and sensitive to ageing parents. The writer-director’s views on the role of rituals in the grieving process make some scenes and the characters in those scenes mere vehicles—they are either out of place or contrived. Goodbye is a mish-mash of views in the way it looks at death and religious ritualism.

It opens in a night club. Tara, a lawyer who has just won her first case, is in psychedelic free fall. Next morning, before she can nurse her monumental hangover, she comes to know that her mother Gayatri (Neena Gupta) has suddenly died and her father Harish (Amitabh Bachchan) has been trying to get in touch with her all night. Guilt-ridden, heartbroken, ashen and angry, she comes back home to a father who has suddenly embraced a neighbour’s advice to follow some absurd rituals, unwilling to understand his daughter’s outrage.

Harish, the family’s Golden Retriever Stupid and a live-in house help, almost an adoptive daughter, are yet to process the shock and paralyzing grief. They have no tears, only a list to make of all the sundry tasks at hand and calls to inform the three sons—a high-profile executive always on the phone (Pavail Gulati) married to a confused yet calm British woman (Elli Avram), a Sikh adopted son (Sahil Mehta), and a son who is fond of climbing mountains (Abhishekh Khan).

As news arrives, the four children converge at the family home in Chandigarh at various points of time. It’s obvious Gayatri was this family’s glue and joie de vivre, and that each person she has left behind has a unique bond with her.

Fake tears abound around the dead body, which, according to a puritan neighbour and friend of Harish (Ashish Vidyarthi) needs to be preserved in a particular direction and a particular way outside the family home. The absurdities inherent in the ritualistic rigour which Harish is easily swayed to follow against his best judgement, is the fulcrum of the first hour of the film. The rituals especially trigger Tara, who is the family’s wilful child. Nobody really gets along with each other, and everybody has each other’s back—a family trait that transcends provinciality and race.

There are some moments of outrageous humour; some even have a deadpan drift. The film has intermittent patches of complete derailment, with contrived, unconvincing scenes including one in which the father finds it revolting that his forever-plugged ambitious son has the audacity to be in bed indulging in grief sex with his wife. How un-Indian that is to be believable is a given; the writing and the way the scene is handled makes it farcical in an unintentional way. Astonishingly, the editing by L. Sreekar Prasad, whose brilliance can be seen in last week’s release Ponniyin Selvan, is inept and thoughtless in Bahl’s film. Some sequences get overstretched pointlessly, and some scenes are eloquently succinct.

Rashmika Mandanna

There is no consistency to the pacing of the story. The conclusion, meant to be sigh-inducing and cathartic for the family and the audience, is again a laboured stretch. Despite its raw emotional core and the story’s easy relatability, Bahl makes it dissipated—and even sloppy in parts—in execution. Tara’s transition from a scornful rationalist to embracing ritualistic faith is jarring. The solemn truth that grieving rituals after a funeral allow a family to process their loss gets an argument and a half—and finally religious structures, and not reason, come to the family’s rescue. The two sons have the clearsighted realisation that to shave their hair after their mother’s death is necessary because it is necessary to vanquish their egos.

So even with a clear and radiant emotional core in its story, Goodbye suffers from a hurried, haphazard execution in thought as well as in some technical areas like editing. A smartly animated sequence of the way Harish proposed to Gayatri is a zany and inventive addition to the narrative—if only it hadn’t dragged on pointlessly. The screenplay has a lazy architecture, resembling a TV serial, without the rigour and focus of a sharply defined point of view or narrative graph.

The entire cast is competent. Neena Gupta plays the film’s most iridescent character, and I wished for more flashbacks to her time with her husband and children. Bachchan is restrained in some scenes and out of sync with the character’s basic notes in some scenes. This is Mandanna’s first role in a Hindi film, and here too, like her work in cinemas of the South, she has an easy, unthreatening charm without great acting skills to extract her character’s layers. The ensemble cast is overall competent.

I had tears, laughs as well as exasperation in equal measure watching Goodbye. What it is, for sure, is a slightly unusual version of a Bollywood family movie, increasingly a rarity at the theatres these days.

Goodbye releases in theatres on October 7.