Dheeran, in Malayalam directed by Devadath Shaji, is a tough not to crack. It is a deeply flawed film, with characters popping out of every nook and cranny, none irrelevant, but nobody relevant enough to justify this torrential deluge of quirky people who exist only because the screenwriter loves them. We don’t.
Sadly, we don’t get a chance to get to know anyone closely. The storytelling hurls through the characters and their eccentricities. We only know them as what they are meant to be in writing. There is a Malayali character who insists on listening to Hindi songs (I am not too clear on what kind of Hindi music he likes). A character’s wife has eloped with a younger man, and when he later meets his wife and her runaway lover, he is a portrait of masculine sensitivity. Amidst the burlesque and the mayhem, some noticeable box-ticking.
The characters (progressive, regressive) who populate the percolating plot don’t really come together in a defining embrace. They are there as scattered jottings, neither adding to the main plot nor taking away from it.
So where is the centre of this oblique universe? The character we are supposed to cling to—and we do, to an extent—is Eldhose (Rajesh Madhavan), a wiry reed-thin man best suited for comic characters. Here, Rajesh Madhavan is constantly placed in sticky situations which are potentially comic but are actually horrific in their ramifications. A man is squeezed into a drum and burnt alive Cancel the laughter.
The migrant issue is dealt with brutal directness when Eldhose runs away from his quaint little village in Kerala to big bad Tamil Nadu to work for a gangster who moonlights as a perfume seller (Vineeth). This dichotomous means of earning a livelihood could have served as a huge platform for satire. But the writer-director never really gets down to leaning into laughter.
The tone dithers between the stark and the satirical, never quite comfortable in either sphere, positioned neither here nor there, the film simply doesn’t know where to go. When news reaches Eldhose’s village that he has been killed in Tamil Nadu, a motley group of villagers set off in an ambulance to get his body back. Here onwards the narrative acquires the hue of a road film.
But with conditions. This is not a road movie. It is not a black comedy on elopement, death and resurrection. Then what is it? A large chunk of the story is a flashback about a vicious gangster who gets into an aggressive mode with Eldhose and his friend in Tamil Nadu.
This is the weakest, most jumpy part of the plot. Merging a road movie with a gangster flick is achieved with an abundance of violence, clumsy and askew. It doesn’t add up.
This is a potentially interesting crime drama waiting for a rescue. Too many crooks spoil the plot.
