‘Be the hero of your own life’
It took Richard Attenborough three hours and 11 minutes to tell the story of how Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence and through partition, only a single minute of screentime more than Neeraj Pandey uses in his new biopic of that modern day Indian icon, MS Dhoni.
Pandey’s MS Dhoni: The Untold Story is the epic tale of a handsome and talented young cricketer who grows up to become a handsome and talented older cricketer. It was released last Friday, and made Rs66 crore (£7.79m) in its first three days. Only Salman Khan’s Sultan has had a more lucrative opening weekend in India this year. The Dhoni pic is on worldwide release (on Monday there were over 50 screenings in London alone) so will likely wind up as one of the highest grossing sports flicks of 2016 and make more than any other cricket movie in history.
Which, admittedly, puts it top of a pretty short list. One that for a long time was only a couple of movies long, beginning with the Basil Radford crime caper It’s Not Cricket and ending with The Final Test, written by Terence Rattigan, directed by Anthony Asquith, which is a curious story about a batsman, Sam Palmer, playing in his last Test for England. He wants his son to come along but the boy, a bookish sort, prefers to go and meet a famous poet instead. The poet – wouldn’t you know it? – turns out to be a mad keen cricket fan. He insists that the boy has his priorities all back-to-front and that they would be far better off watching the Test than worrying about free verse, and so they race along to the ground to watch Palmer’s final innings.
If the film is known at all now, it’s because of the cameos made by some of the more famous England players of the day, like Len Hutton, Denis Compton, and Cyril Washbrook, their acting often so stiff and mechanical that their scenes seem to stray almost into the uncanny valley and leave viewers wondering whether they’re really robots in whites. But The Final Test deserves to be better known, if only for its timeless message that frivolous as it is, cricket is a thing worth celebrating. Rattigan was a fine player himself, who once turned out for Harrow against Eton at Lord’s, and the film serves as his love letter to the game, its underlying theme encapsulated in the lovely lines:
“Do you prefer Keats to Wordsworth?”
“My dear boy, you mustn’t expect me to talk about literature when there’s a Test match on, my brain doesn’t function properly.”
In 2003, Paul Morrison made a sweet little film called Wondrous Oblivion, about neighbouring families, one Jewish, the other West Indian, bound by their mutual love of cricket. But by then, the business of making motion pictures about the sport had mostly relocated to the one place where it made any kind of sense, the subcontinent.
Hollywood reckons the game so recherché that Sam Mendes cut the cricket-themed scenes he shot for Casino Royale. But there have been a string of Bollywood and Lollywood films about the game, only a couple of which have made an impression here in Britain. Like Lagaan, Ashutosh Gowariker’s entertaining film about a match between two teams from an Indian village and the British Army.
MS Dhoni: The Untold Story is a different kind of pic. He was involved in the production of it – in fact, according to reports it was his manager who first came up with the idea of making a movie. And I promise that you’ll seldom have come across anyone who has taken so much inspiration from Nora Ephron’s exhortation to be the hero of your own life.
It begins at the Wankhede Stadium, on 2 April 2011, in the middle of the World Cup final. We see Dhoni, played by the dead ringer Sushant Singh Rajput, watch India’s first two wickets fall on TV and decide to promote himself up to No5 in the batting order. Which leads directly to the deathless opening line: “Excuse me, Gary” as Dhoni tells his coach about the plan.
Dhoni flicks his collar down, slips his cap on, slings his bat over his shoulder and strolls out into the ground, the soundtrack now all thumping drums and raucous guitar strums. It’s a ludicrous scene, and, so long as you’ve an appetite for bombastic moviemaking, a brilliantly enjoyable one. From there, the film cuts back, back, back, all the way to the maternity ward, and Dhoni’s arrival in the world, delivered not by a spaceship from the planet Krypton, but a bumbling midwife. Soon after, we are treated to the first of many montages, this one of Dhoni catching cricket balls at his first training session. Pandey seems to believe that there’s no such thing as a scene that wouldn’t be better if it was chopped up and played in slow-mo with a soft rock soundtrack.
So we get montages of Dhoni hitting sixes, riding his motorbike, going shopping with his girlfriend, hitting more sixes, arguing over team selections, hitting more sixes, sitting on a bench, and hitting more sixes. Along the way we are treated to the origin story of the helicopter shot, which is too enjoyable to spoil by sharing it here, his first encounter with the teenage Yuvraj Singh, who apparently won a game in the Under-19s simply by being so damn cool that Dhoni’s team were too intimidated to bowl straight, interminable scenes describing the time Dhoni spent working as a ticket inspector at Kharagpur railway station, and one genuinely shocking moment which I, at least, had no idea about until it played out on screen.
It sounds exhaustive, but, sadly, we don’t get to hear anything about how Dhoni felt when his team principal at the Chennai Super Kings, Gurunath Meiyappan was implicated in illegal spot-fixing and banned from the game for bringing it into disrepute. Or anything much about how Dhoni’s dealings with the BCCI, or his feelings about his fellow team-mates. Ah well, as John Briley wrote in his script for Attenborough’s Gandhi: “No man’s life can be encompassed in one telling. There is no way to give each year its allotted weight, to include each event, each person who helped to shape a lifetime.” After all, there’s only so much that a director can fit in to three hours and 10 minutes of film. Especially when he has to find time for all those sixes.
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