Salman Rushdie wrote the screenplay for this epic, which is adapted from his 1981, Booker Prize-winning novel. Rushdie narrates the film, too, so the authorial voice underpins the entire effort, which makes it all the more sad that Midnight’s Children is such a lifeless jumble. The story is a multigenerational saga that contains large doses of magical realism and tells the story of India’s nationalist struggles over the course of the 20th century, as seen through the experiences of its protagonist Saleem Sinai (played as an adult by Satya Bhabha and as a boy by Darsheel Safary).
Saleem is one of “midnight’s children”: the 1,001 babies whose births coincided with that of their nation on the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947. In Rushdie’s telling, these children have various superpowers that are not unlike those of a band of X-Men. Magic, flying, and telekinesis are some of their qualities, but Saleem seems to possess the most powerful gift of all: The boy can hear the voices of midnight’s children in his head and is able to convene them all at will. But Saleem isn’t Saleem: A hospital nurse switched him at birth with another baby born the same night, a baby from a lower caste who was destined to grow up in poverty. This is hardly the first of the story’s many twists of fate, which begin back in his grandfather’s generation, shortly after the turn of the 10th century.
Canadian-based filmmaker Deepa Mehta (Fire, Earth, Water) seems the perfect candidate to direct Rushdie’s story, having helmed many deeply moving films about the Indian experience. Midnight’s Children falls flat, however. The magical aspects of the story never become fully believable, and she is unable to find a fluid through-line among the tale’s many subplots and thematic strands. There is the sense of the novel having been an unwieldy thing to trim and that what remains are the bare elements of plot and continuity without much of the drama or emotional pull. Midnight’s children are, ultimately, a bereft bunch.
This article appears in June 14 • 2013.
