Had it not been for Pankaj Tripathi, who must have worked hard to get those Vajpayee intonations and mannerisms so perfectly well, Ravi Jadhav's flattering portrait of Vajpayee would have been more vacuous than what we get to see, observes Prasanna Zore.
Two hours and 20 minutes is just not enough to portray Atal Bihari Vajpayee's life and times.
Even as Main Hoon Atal touches upon defining moments, flashes on and off the momentous occasions that shaped the man and his two stints at India's top job, Director Ravi Jadhav fails to project Vajpayee as a man ahead of his times.
That Pankaj Tripathi playing the lead role brings a lot of spontaneity and vigour to the on-screen persona of the poet-prime minister, but that is inadequate when you deal with a political leader whose career has spun across a colourful rainbow: A staunch and committed member of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, Leader of the Opposition, external affairs minister and India's prime minister.
Jadhav spends much of his directorial acumen in trying to build Vajpayee's humane personality: His relationship with his friendly father, his youthful, romantic college life, his love for poetry and his humanistic world view.
But he leaves a huge vacuum in showcasing Vajpayee, the prime minister, who had to deal with the immense pressure of deflecting global criticism after the nuclear tests at Pokhran in May 1998, the statesmanship shown by the man while navigating economic sanctions brought in the wake of the nuclear tests, his disappointment after losing the no confidence motion, tabled by the 'sinister' (Vajpayee's words) Congress by just one vote in 1996, his Amritsar-Lahore bus diplomacy in 1999 to meet his counterpart Nawaz Sharif and the subsequent stab-in-the-back by Pakistani general Pervez Musharraf leading to the Kargil War and how he navigated through those turbulent times.
The film also sidesteps Vajpayee's role in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement launched and led by his long-time friend Lal Krishna Advani across India and how it catapulted BJP from a two-MP party in 1984, following Indira Gandhi's assassination on October 31, 1984, to 81 MPs in 1989 riding on the Ram Janmabhoomi wave.
Vajpayee's December 5 speech, a day before the demolition of Babri mosque by kar sevaks, calling for 'kisi cheez ka nirman karne ke liye dharti ko samtal karna padega' (to build something grand the earth will first need to be flattened first), which many claim was a call for the assembled crowd to demolish the mosque, however, makes to the screen.
This is the only controversial bit in the film that focuses on Vajpayee's humane persona, notwithstanding the remorse that Vajpayee expressed on December 6, 1992 when the mosque was razed to the ground by a frenzied mob in Ayodhya.
All the momentous, defining events that shaped the Vajpayee era, flash past the screen like someone watching a flicker-book for fun.
Had it not been for Pankaj Tripathi, who must have worked hard to get those Vajpayee intonations and mannerisms so perfectly well, Jadhav's flattering portrait of Vajpayee would have been more vacuous than what we get to see.
Perhaps because of the fear that film-makers today live in of being hounded on social media Jadhav seemed to have played safe while making the biopic and offered a uni-layered portrayal of a man whose life and times mesmerised many contemporary Indians.
