Age of Innocent: Laughs on loop for a generation

The news of the passing of Innocent was broken on Malayalam television with all the staples we associate with the death of a people’s man, an icon integral to a state’s popular culture for over three decades. There were phone-ins with grieving colleagues, film clips, shots of a mobile phone-wielding crowd recording celebrity visitors at the hospital, and reporters invariably talking more about the man – friend to all, parliamentarian, cancer survivor with a ready laugh – than the actor.

The portions about the terrific comic actor closed, almost like an afterthought, with the reporters’ comments that he could also play serious characters with poise, followed by a listing of the few such roles he did pull off commendably.

Innocent who died on March 26, aged 75 years, was an original. His actorly traits were so unique and instantly well-received that he rarely had to break the type. The bulk of his most popular work came between the late 1980s and mid-2000s, a period that saw a convergence of prodigious writers, filmmakers, and a generation of talented actors who worked without breaks. Their prolific, overlapping filmographies shaped new sensibilities; they made films where even the bit parts came with character.

Innocent, like many of his contemporaries, worked outside of the methods we associate with the ‘serious actor’. In a career of about five decades, he could play scores of men with the same side-on walk and that unmistakable intonation of his and still, make most of them appear fresh. This was not always about the audience getting conditioned to his distinctive body language or his style of delivering lines. A very composite, mimic-ready template for this, however, was already set with arguably his most enduring character – Mannar Mathai, a theatre troupe owner caught in an abduction gone wrong, in Siddique-Lal’s ‘Ramjirao Speaking’ (1989).

He could also bring nuance and pacing to the characters, adding heft to the seemingly plain, like the middle-aged outsider struggling with life in Mumbai, in ‘Shubhayathra’ (1990), and making even the ones bordering on camp eminently entertaining, like the babysitter with a quirky rhyme in ‘Thoovalsparsham’ (1990).

In 1993, Innocent hit the highs with the hugely popular comic segments of Fazil’s psychological thriller ‘Manichitrathazhu’. In Priyadarsan’s Midhunam, he is superb as Sethumadhavan (Mohanlal)’s recalcitrant elder brother. This was also the year he played his most evidently uncomic character, Warrier, the placating father-figure to Mohanlal’s troubled anti-hero in ‘Devasuram’.

These partnerships were significant. Especially crackling was his chemistry with Mohanlal – ‘No 20 Madras Mail’ (1990), ‘Kilukkam’ (1991), ‘Vietnam Colony’ (1993), and ‘Chandralekha’ (1997) among their top outings – and in the latter years, Dileep, with whom he peaked in ‘Kalyanaraman’ (2002). With K P A C Lalitha, he formed a consistently entertaining partnership, some of their finest moments coming in ‘Manichitrathazhu’, ‘Gajakesariyogam’ (1990), and ‘Sasneham’ (1990).

His teaming with Mammootty in Ranjith’s masterly satire ‘Pranchiyettan and the Saint’ (2010) returned terrific results. Innocent was cast in over 35 films directed by Sathyan Anthikkad, many of them written by Sreenivasan. Theirs was a combination so organic that it even allowed him to play a politician from the north in ‘Sandesham’ (1991), the ring of his heavily Thrissur-flavoured Hindi, curiously, making this casting choice all the more interesting.

What could a younger Innocent have been in the hands of norm-bending new-wave filmmakers? It is also a shame that he did not play the antagonist more often; bits of what he could have done with his largely untapped dark-comic side are out there in ‘Keli’ (1991), ‘Apoorvam Chilar’ (1991) and ‘Adwaitham’ (1992).

The collaborations were also a reflection of the personal relations he had with these actors and filmmakers. Innocent’s contemporaries have said that the actor was an extension of the man himself.

For a generation, he was part of a comforting mental collage that evoked a good time. The reruns, memes, and reels will, still, double as a throwback to that time.