We Are Family: Y! Meta Review

Karan Johar has never targeted only the upwardly-mobile urban Indian; his films are made saleable to a wider South Asian diaspora and the NRI audience. His films have always appealed to a global audience, and we have happily lapped up slick productions shot in exotic foreign locales.

But packaging alone doesn’t work every time; the audience has learnt to look under the wrapping paper, as it were, and to appreciate well-told stories. This evolution of the Indian viewer was recently demonstrated by the success of a Peepli [Live] against the ordinary performance of an I Hate Luv Storys.

The audience is increasingly sure of what it wants: films where characters take precedence over stars; where the plot is integral to the film and not merely a peg to hang the packaging on; where compelling narratives take precedence over floss marketed wall-to-wall.

While the audience sends out this message, Karan Johar is apparently afflicted with a form of hearing disability that prevents him from hearing; his films continue to focus on the branding and marketing at the expense of plot, and the disconnect is gradually beginning to cost him at the box office.

Saibal Chatterjee of NDTV underlines this aspect, in his review of We Are Family:

We Are Family looks pretty. But then which Karan Johar production doesn’t? Trouble is there is little in the film that could take your attention away from the surface-level inducements.

Having made that topline comment, he elaborates:

Saddled with a screenplay that simply doesn’t provide the instant invigoration of the original film, Kareena is unable to pack any real punch into the character of a career-minded girl who must prepare herself to play mother against all odds to the three children of the once-married man she loves (Arjun Rampal). Full marks to Kareena for effort but much less for effect.

Saibal’s comment is true of the film as a whole. Though it is built on the blueprint of a famous Hollywood weepie, what it delivers is rank mediocrity, “swinging wildly from the vacuous to the mawkish”.

The fuel that powers KJo productions is syrup, which the director and producer layers on thick in all his productions. Coupled with this is the tendency to gloss over anything that is remotely discomfiting.

He has done it before –in Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna for instance, we have the promising premise of infidelity, and had he treated the subject as it deserved to be treated, it could have made for compelling, even path-breaking, narrative. But KJo cannot have flawed and unhappy characters; he cannot have any character remotely recognizable in real life. So we end up with syrupy treatment of an edgy premise, culminating in this completely ridiculous climax where the ex-husband (Abhishek Bachchan) asks his ex-wife (Rani Mukherjee), who cheated on him, to go and find her true love.

Another problem area is KJo’s tendency to mawkish melodrama – something Nikhat Kazmi underlines in her review:

Also, there is an overriding sense of grief and sobriety that haunts the proceedings, as the family grapples with the threat of tragedy looming round the corner. Unlike Stepmom, which had a lightness of being, despite the impending doom, We Are Family merely has the Jailhouse Rock (Kajol rocks in this sequence) rendition to boast of as dramatic relief, unless you count the noodle war and the water hose splash (cliched!) as family fun and games. End result? You end up squeezing a lot of wet tissues — specially in the second half — by the time the movie ends, and walk out with a leaden heart.

Much of plotting is about striking the right balance – and in this particular film, the balance between the airy and the hyper-emotional is a casualty of the KJo school of film-making. Here is Rajeev Masand:

This remake of that Julia Roberts-Susan Sarandon weepie is a mostly faithful adaptation, save for a few original digressions that were unwarranted. For one, it’s hard to fathom any woman — even one that’s weeks away from death — inviting her husband’s girlfriend to live with them at her home; and those scenes in which both women happily share domestic duties are sheer sugarcoated stupidity. It’s exactly the kind of exaggerated treatment that makes it hard to take these characters or their pain seriously.

The story just doesn’t seem to follow a normal trajectory. Preeti Arora writes:

In Stepmom (We Are Family is the official remake with permissions et al), Kareena’s character played by Julia Roberts is pivotal to the story. How she succeeds in building a relationship with the kids on her own terms. It’s a slow evolution. Here it’s instantaneous. One minute they’re spitting venom and suddenly they’re worshipping the ground she walks on.

It is rare that film critics speak in one voice, but the latest from the KJo stable appears to have accomplished the seemingly impossible.