MOVIE REVIEW ~ BHOPAL: A PRAYER FOR RAIN

Bhopal: A Prayer For Rain
Director: Ravi Kumar
Cast: Mischa Barton, Martin Sheen, Warren Anderson, Rajpal Yadav

Rating: 

This month, it will be precisely 30 years as the Bhopal gas tragedy, the world’s biggest industrial tragedy. In September, Warren Anderson died, without ever having faced test in India for his position in the terrible disaster. Anderson was the then-CEO of Union Carbide, the American pesticide plant from which 40 tonnes of poisonous methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas leaked out into surrounding shanties, murdering thousands of people and animals, its aftereffects still killing and disfigurement generations. 30 years, still no fairness. Bhopal: A Prayer For Rain shows how Union Carbide flouted main safety defense, resulting in the gas leak. The film, directed by Ravi Kumar, is a half-baked, fictionalized retelling, with real protagonists like Warren Anderson (played with depth by Martin Sheen) and the unrelenting journalist Motwani (Kal Penn), and some shaped for theatrical result like the rickshaw puller Dilip (Rajpal Yadav). This docudrama-like characteristic follows a trait route, mainly told through Dilip’s eyes as he becomes a safety worker at Union Carbide when a co-worker, his own bastiwala, dies of chemical poisoning. Yadav, and Tannistha Chatterjee playing his wife, flash understanding in us as they see expect in the very factory that in the end crushes them. Anderson is given some unselfish layers and Sheen captures that well, but the character quickly slips into typecast with commonplace appearance. In fact, the film falters through its dialogues – the Hindi bits are strong, but it jewels false as the Indian characters trip into English. Another weak link is the solid Mischa Barton, playing a French journalist who accuses Anderson of running the plant hazardously. Penn gets the stubborn part of Motwani right, but his Hindi is uncomfortable, and his brash shirts give his hard-nosed journalist an origin touch. There is an intelligence of drama in the final moments, in the way that the gas leak is shot: the disorder at the general hospital, the bodies scattered in the slums, on the hospital steps, in the streets. It’s commendable that the film relives the awful calamity of the gas leak, but miserably, it has few moments that are strange or even authentically moving. I’m going with two out of five.

Reviewer: N. Basu (TNI Siliguri)