Big daddy: "Vishwanath & Sons"

The current Top Ten hit Vishwanath & Sons is Tamil cinema doing the single male childraiser trope, as previously worked through by major stars the whole world over: Michael Keaton in Mr. Mom, Hugh Grant in About a Boy, Diljit Dosanjh in Honsla Rakh. The star here is the South Indian favourite Suriya (24, Retro), hoping some sustained nappy-changing can pull him out of a mid-career slump. His Sanjay Vishwanath presents initially as less caregiver, more crackshot: at the Paris Olympics, where we first find him, he's seen to win the 25m air pistol gold even after intruders break into his locker and smash up his equipment. Sanju, as he's fondly known, isn't the worst candidate for fatherhood: he can fix that air pistol, because he's inherited his late father's practicality, and he dedicates that medal to the mother whose phone calls he insists on answering on the very first ring. (Wisely perhaps, seeing as this queenly figure appears to live in one of the palaces from Dune.) The surprise is how quickly fatherhood is foisted upon our guy. Just five minutes after Facetiming a doctor in San Francisco, Sanju is walking back through the arrivals gate of Chennai Airport, bearing a surrogate son in his manly arms and resembling that old Athena poster made flesh. 

At which point, Venky Atluri's film begins to burn through plot. The kid gets sick and needs a bone marrow transfusion; Sanju isn't a match, so further input from the child's mother is required. Another movie might have made that search the entire film; Sanju just hops on another plane to the West Coast and brings her back over. (Already, we sense this is one of those plots wherein money is no object: it explains why Sanjay and his mum share that palace.) The surrogate, Maddy, is a 22-year-old who's studying medicine but majoring in partying hard; she's introduced jumping off a roof and into a swimming pool, fully clothed. She's played by Mamitha Baiju, who instantly freshens up the film's perilously fusty and conservative milieu by acting in a mode we might describe as Alia Bhatt Modern, sassing everyone around her and organising a minor insurrection in Sanju's office. But Maddy also raises a problem. She's 22, Sanju/Suriya is pushing fifty. Is Vishwanath & Sons doomed to go in a direction we fear?

The answer, it turns out, is not really, but that's only because everybody here is working from the year's least coherent screenplay, written either by a six-year-old with red crayons or by a Mexican jumping bean. What you want from a softhearted melodrama like this is more or less what you'd want for your offspring: careful development, consistent growth. But this utterly distractible film keeps pinging off at bizarre, sometimes baffling tangents (at its star's behest?): an appearance on a Surprise, Surprise-like reunion show that ends with our hero lecturing the audience about responsibility, a late-night heart-to-heart between mum and Maddy that reveals Sanju has been sowing his wild oats widely, a fight in a hotel restaurant that almost results in Sanju taking ownership of the entire hotel (?). So he's dutiful, and a loverman, and a tough guy besides: all of these episodes present as scenes an aging star might insist on adding to a workable script so as to bolster his reputation and perceived potency, no matter how poorly they serve the pre-existing narrative. 

At some point - and it is, I'm afraid, an early point - the nonsense begins to obscure the sense: you need only take one look at the vertiginous stone staircase at the centre of the Vishwanath family mansion to see that nobody would realistically be allowed to raise a toddler here. There's so much nonsense that you might actually long for the hero to take up with his sophomoric houseguest, because at least that would have some logical precedent in the context of vehicles for middle-aged male stars. But flaws in the characterisation prevent us from cheering anybody on. Broad-shouldered protector Sanju feels more like an image a star wants to project than a credible character an actor can actually play: for a medal-winning shooter, he also spends very little time (none, in fact) on the range. (Maybe because he's clearly spending it all in the gym.) Baiju is a find - it's been a while since a newcomer has lit up the screen so - but Maddy is demonstrably the creation of an older male writer-director: the character barely looks as though she's had a period, let alone a baby, and of course she develops a crush of some kind on big daddy, even if he nobly declines to act on it. (By the way, Sanju's noble, too.) The hope may have been that all the nonsense would even obscure the film's weird sexual politics, but every now and again in Vishwanath & Sons - in the gaps between scenes that never connect - you spy a queasy male fantasy about keeping a young woman around to turn down. And that's the generous reading: the alternative is that everyone here was set to applying some romantic gloss to the notion of rich mother's boys hiring out young women's wombs. Certain hits just give you the ick.

Vishwanath & Sons is now showing in selected cinemas.