Serious Men Movie Review - Don't Have Title For Primitive Minds Like You

Though not always smooth, Serious Men - with a fierce Nawazuddin - still is a pleasant enough ride.

Ayyan Mani (a superb Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is the kind of person who will rant about inferiority in our society. But given a chance, he too will succumb to the principles promoting it. When his son Adi (Aakshath Das) is rejected from a school, Ayyan talks about giving priority to merit and not the caste. Later he will use status to threaten a child on the rooftop, quite chillingly. He will go on and on about how unfair the system is in recognizing real talent but will cheat his way to the top. Working as PA to an astronomer named Dr. Arvind Acharya (Nassar) at the National Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, all Ayyan has seen is injustice. For him, the insults could very well be the result of his Dalit caste despised by his Brahmin employer. If the bosses referred to there workers as a moron, imbecile, and knobhead, their favors are returned by the term "Serious Men."

The ragged life of Ayyan turns when Adi is born. We have all seen numerous rags-to-riches, rise to fame, and rich vs. poor stories. What sets Serious Men apart is the spin on child prodigy. What if a star is not born but cunningly manufactured? Adi talks of space, gravity, matter, Venus, photosynthesis. His knowledge on these topics extends as deep as Ayyan's one-line read on the stratosphere on Wikipedia. The father-son quality time consists of scientific questions that Adi must ask to show off in school the next day. The teachers are outraged by his unanswerable curiosity. When called in for a meeting, Ayyan "casually" slips in a conversation about Adi being the winner of Switzerland's Omega Science quiz competition, which has opened doors to many prestigious schools. It is like a warning: You have a problem with my kid? Fine. I will take him elsewhere. The principal, though, does not want to lose her star student and expectedly so.

In the eyes of the people, Adi is a genius. The paparazzi and TV show hosts revolve around him. His little secret remains mutual between Ayyan and him. Soon political parties start to participate. Anuja Dhavre (Shweta Basu Prasad, the girl from Makdee) sees an opportunity to promote her development project - high-rising buildings and all that bullshit - through Adi. That means Adi must prepare a speech. Asking questions is one thing, how can he deliver lines and lines of speech? No need to fret, technology comes to the rescue. A Bluetooth device, connected to his father, helps in the delivery. So if he forgets, Ayyan's voice would guide him. It helps that Adi wears a hearing aid, camouflaging the device. Now he can quickly answer 786 + 3378 is equal to 4164.

At a TV show called "Wonderkid," Ayyan notices the circus going on with other kids and refuses to let Adi go on stage. According to him, it is a mockery of talent - "I didn't do all this to parade Adi around like a circus animal." Little does he realize the distinction between there mockery and his schemes. All is good and fine until events happen in sync with his desires. If they do not fall under his likeability, then go to hell, even if it means ignoring his son's glorious smile as he watches a performance from backstage.

Serious Men is brill when it doesn't make much noise. When Adi's face is covered in powder, Ayyan objects ("Don't get lost in this skin-tone crap") and takes him to wash his face. The camera follows them into the darkness and remains before retreating with them. One must enter the dirt to remove the dirt. There is a scene where all the lights in an auditorium are dimmed except for the one shining right above Ayyan, accentuating how he is willing to keep others in the dark for his profit. He doesn't even tell his wife Oja (Indira Tiwari) about there son's "great mind." It was a little underwhelming when Serious Men started sounding like Instagram posts - "Your angst is right, but your actions are not" "Kids are like flowers. Either they bloom or die". Perhaps more bizarre is the ending scene at a beach that didn't make sense, at least to me.

Ayyan is among those Dads who want their son to achieve and become whatever they couldn't. The culmination of this pressure is effectively shown in the scene where Adi non-stop recites lines from the speech. Sometimes, he bangs his head. It is heartbreaking. The camera turns black and back like someone closing and opening there eyes in the hope of escaping a nightmare. He complains about the mug-up system in education but has created the same machine inside his son. It hits him hard, and we feel the reaction. When Adi finally speaks the truth, "I don't know anything," the people see it as modesty. I almost chuckled at this half-witted audience. But how can they see verity when a mountain of lies has hidden the truth? Serious Men got too serious, no?

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