Hotel Mumbai

My mind and my heart have been at constant war with each other ever since my screening of Hotel Mumbai ended.  My mind tells me that this is an incredibly well-made film, with good performances, and that it perfectly captures the terror of that tragic day in November 2008 when the Indian city of Mumbai was laid siege to terrorist attacks, and were largely centered on the famous Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.  The movie is brutal, unrelenting, and unflinching in its desire to show us the tragedies that the staff and guests endured.

That's when my heart chimes in, and asks why did I need to see this?  The movie made me feel unclean, like I was seeing something I was not supposed to.  I have admired and recommended movies about tragic real life events before, but this just seemed relentless and unending in its desire to flash misery and violent images up on the screen.  And just why is it being so unflinchingly brutal in the first place?  The movie never really seems to have anything it wants to say, other than to make us feel sorry for the victims.  The characters on the screen are thin, and many are not given any sort of personality.  This includes both the victims and the attackers.  I never got involved with anyone up on the screen.  It got to the point where it felt like the movie was just putting these people up on the screen so I could watch them die horribly in some way.

Now, please do not misunderstand me.  I am not wishing for a watered down or a "sanitized" cinematic take on the event.  I don't even think one could exist.  I simply am saying that the movie felt like it was reveling in the bloodshed and the carnage, and not giving me enough of a dramatic hook for me to get involved.  And when the movie does try to character build, it often feels forced or tacked on.  I'll give you one example.  This scene centers on a hotel staffer named Arjun (played by Dev Patel).  While hiding with some of the guests in a sealed room, a white woman expresses concern over his headwear and beard.  He approaches the woman, and gives her what sounds like a prepared and scripted speech, showing her pictures of him with his family, and explaining how his turban and hairstyle have ties to his religious beliefs.  The scene rings false, because it sounds preachy.  It doesn't feel like real life, and in a movie that seems to be striving for harsh realism, that's a big problem.

Rather than being real, Hotel Mumbai often came across as calculated to me.  There's a kind of sadistic coldness to the film's approach.  As I mentioned, we never really get to learn much about anyone in the movie, so we get to watch faceless people die in misery over and over for two hours.  Is it tragic and terrible when the terrorists force some ladies from the front desk to call individual rooms, and tell them that a rescue team has arrived, so that the guests will come out of hiding and can be killed?  Of course!  But, it also feels manipulative and needlessly cruel to depict such an act when it is just there, seemingly for shock value.  It is painful to watch, but there is also an emptiness to it.  And the more the filmmakers force us to watch horrific imagery, the more empty the movie seemed to me.  The movie is tragic, but it doesn't want to truly focus on the people involved in the tragedy.  It just wants to get to the next moment of cruelty and bloodshed. 

There were many moments where I almost felt compelled to walk out of the theater.  I wanted to stop watching the film.  Some may credit this to the movie being effective in its depiction of terrible events, but I think otherwise.  This movie sickened me.  It did not want to create an honest and intriguing dramatization of the events.  It almost seems to want to be an endurance test for the audience.  There are very few human or dramatically effective moments here.  One moment that is very good concerns one of the terrorists named Imran, played by Amandeep Singh.  It concerns a phone conversation that he has with his father while he is having a crisis of faith.  The screams of anguish that come after the phone call, and the expression on his face both during and after the call have an honesty that the rest of the film lacks.  It's a moment of humanity in a film that largely feels exploitative and nasty.

Outside of this moment, the entire cast seem to exist as plot devices.  Some exist to die, some exist to act stoically in the face of terror, and some exist to engage in scenes of survival that feel overly calculated instead of tense.  Watching Hotel Mumbai, I was often reminded of Paul Greengrass' film United 93, which depicted the events on one of the hijacked planes on September 11th.  That film took a similarly stark and realistic depiction of a tragic event, but it did so in a less exploitative way.  In fact, it felt more real, because it largely used unknown actors to play the roles.  This movie gives us some recognizable faces like Patel, Armie Hammer, and Jason Isaacs, which only adds to the cheap and manipulative tone.  When you consider that a lot of these name actors are given so little characterization to work with, it feels even more inferior.

Hotel Mumbai is not the worst movie out there by a long shot, but it is easily the worst time I've had at the movies in a very long while.  So, while my mind may tell me that this is a well-made film for what it is, I think my heart wins out in the end.  I did not need to see the kind of things this movie showed me, and I did not need such a dramatically hollow take on such bloody chaos.

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