Main Atal Hoon review: Pankaj Tripathi is the shining light of a simplistic biopic

Pankaj Tripathi as Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Main Atal Hoon. (Photo cropped, via X/@TripathiiPankaj)

In a scene from Main Atal Hoon, our protagonist sits with his life-long friend inside a cinema hall. They are there to watch a romantic film, the philosophical extent of which is neatly rolled into an allegory. Cinema offers an idealistic world; the kind our protagonist argues is achievable if not for the shroud of lies that prevent perception from becoming perspective. It’s a decent thought, to combine the art of storytelling with the nature of dreaming. In a film about a poet-turned-politician, you’d expect smooth lines, deep aphorisms and larger-than-life ideas that offer us an insight into what was underneath the bodily flesh of one of India’s most popular Prime Ministers and political leaders. Led by an in-form Pankaj Tripathi, Main Atal Hoon is, instead, formulaic, dull and it barely offers anything more than a robust timeline of history.

Tripathi is Atal Bihari Vajpayee, as much as Vajpayee himself could have been. He absorbs the persona, the fidgety movements, the caution and echoes an image most people who lived through his tenure would be familiar with. This, however, is a biopic which means the story actually begins in his childhood where a young Atal exhibits early signs of eerie intellectualism and a welcome knack for public speaking. His equation with his supportive father, played by Piyush Mishra, is intriguing but underexplored.

Also read: Main Atal Hoon: Pankaj Tripathi on playing former Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in forthcoming biopic

A born poet, a charming orator, a young Atal wants to serve the country. As a writer and essayist, he begins with publishing journals and fierce criticisms of India’s belated awakening post-independence. Major events shape him, including the Partition, Gandhi’s assassination and so on. Through the ups and downs, Vajpayee is shown to have this magnanimous air of surrendering to a cause in ways few people can.

A litany of who’s who of Indian polity make up the giant cast. There are the Gandhis, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, J.P. Narayan, Lal Krishna Advani and so on and so forth. These are all icons who have shaped the discourse of our history and the tip of our present. Political allegiances notwithstanding, it’s an undeniable part of collective Indian past. Main Atal Hoon is obviously biased towards certain a worldview. Beyond that political caveat, though, the film struggles to actually say about the fascinating personality, anything that a Wikipedia page wouldn’t.

Directed by Ravi Jadhav, the film does have likeable elements. At least it recreates the past with some authenticity and delicate cinematography. The sincerity to breathe life into the past may well be restricted by the craft, but it’s definitely not stifled by a lack of ambition. The speeches, which would of course be central to a master orator’s life story are done well. Then there is Tripathi’s performance itself, that though straightjacketed and overly saccharine, still manages to recreate the man who was never not intriguing to listen to.

On some level, the actor, a suave orator himself seems the perfect man for the job. The credibility of that fitment, however, is never really stretched for something deeper, telling and maybe even unsettling.

For example, Vajpayee’s well-known veneration of Pandit Nehru is teased but never quite studied. His adopted family comes together like a soapy ritual as opposed to a fascinating socio-bureaucratic arrangement. It’s swiftly framed as the convergence of conveniences as compared to something more intimate and maybe even challenging.

Films that are overly kind to their subjects evidently tend to become the myth they believe they are working towards unravelling. As an accommodating and maybe repentant leader, Vajpayee’s importance in the canon of Indian leadership is a vacuum that no amount of authority or competence can really fill. And yet what made the man so determined yet soft is never quite explored in a film that quite simply wants to tell you what happened instead of wondering why it happened.

Main Atal Hoon obviously has glaring flaws, chief of all is this insistence to not allow Vajpayee to have an inner life. Even the origins of his poetry are earmarked as utopia-building exercises as opposed to tools to probe the complexity within. They sound like inspiring lines that maybe belong in the mouth of someone who knows what to do with them. Not that it makes the man any less significant, but it does make the myth murkier and muddier.

Ultimately, Main Atal Hoon traces history with the attentiveness of a student rather than a researcher. It doesn’t wish to intrude, query or interpret but merely trace the pipeline. This was a great man, but what made him great, other than some obvious qualities, we are never really told. Sure there is some charm to simply watch a master actor take the stage, but after a point, he needs something to work with other than a thin dossier on a legend.