'Main Atal Hoon' movie review: Vajpayee biopic is propaganda more than history

Atal Bihari Vajpayee called Nehru a peculiar, divided personality, with a combination of aggression and pacifism. Nehru had the grace to appreciate a debutante parliamentarian’s criticism of his governance. Though there is no documentary evidence, an urban legend is that Nehru predicted that Atal Bihari Vajpayee would be prime minister one day.  

In the latter part of Vajpayee’s career, he had to face the same accusation of being a divided personality.

He joined his ordinary party workers who egged each other “to bring down Babri Masjid”.

The only difference was that Vajpayee used poetic language and demanded that the ground be flattened (structure be razed). After the Godhra riots, it was the same Vajypayee who was moved by the extent of human loss and rioting. He publicly requested Modi to rule the land with righteousness aka Raja Dharma.

If you thought that the director of this biopic would explore these aspects of the former prime minister and bring us up close to him as a human being, it leaves you disappointed. 

It is difficult to translate a career that spanned 60 years of public life into a film of 135 minutes. The creative team of ‘Main Atal Hoon’ had to decide what to choose. 

While making the selection, the director’s preferences and political orientations come alive.   
The director is not an unbiased chronicler of the poet and politician that Vajpayee was. Instead, he uses incidents in the subject’s life to highlight own his political preferences.   

Ravi spends a lot of time on the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and the birth of the BJP. Both are underlined with melodrama in terms of music and writing.

The former PM’s dalliances with Rajkumari in his college days and her re-entry in the later part of his life get more screen time than his struggles during the Emergency and the achievements in Pokhran and Kargil. 

Pankaj Tripathi as Vajpayee is a miscast. He gets some of Vajpayee’s mannerisms right. However, he ends up using it for all occasions, including during an intimate conversation with his father.   

The entire ensemble of characters including L K Advani is caricatured to show Vajpayee as a superhero. The script seems unnaturally floral.

Of course, the dead prime minister was a poet. That does not mean that even ordinary conversations ought to have rhyming words
and oodles of metaphors.  In all, this is disappointing fare. The film is not a biopic but propaganda material for the upcoming polls.

Reading about Vajpayee in Wikipedia would be more entertaining.