Manjhi - The Mountain Man
Synopsis:
There is Nawazuddin Siddiqui swinging a hammer at solid rock like his life depends on it while screaming his lungs out in the blistering heat, covered from head to toe in thick grey dust and sweat, and honestly it is just pure unadulterated madness.
So then to understand why this man is practically trying to chisel a massive mountain into tiny little pieces with a single hammer and chisel, we gotta go back to the start of the whole mess in this brutal rural village where nothing ever goes right.
Dashrath Manjhi is just a regular poor guy living in Gehlaur village, and let me tell you, the village itself is a whole vibe because everyone is terrified of the brutal upper caste landlord named Ruplal Yadav played by Pankaj Tripathi, who just sits around looking evil and menacing in every single frame while chewing on paan and terrorizing the poor labourers.
Before all the mountain-shattering drama really kicks off, Dashrath tries to run away from his abusive home because his dad literally tries to sell him off to an older guy for money, which is wild, but he eventually sneaks back home years later as a grown man.
The funny thing is that when he sneaks back into town, he spots this absolute ray of sunshine named Phagunia played by Radhika Apte, and she's wearing this gorgeous bright yellow sari that stands out so much against the dusty, washed-out browns and grays of the surrounding dirt roads and mud huts.
Right after that accidental meeting, they fall instantly in love and get married, but because her father demands a bride price that Dashrath doesn't have, they have to elope and live a tough life in the mountains together, which brings us straight to the interval block of the movie.
Bollywood movies love a good dramatic interval point, and right before the intermission hits, Phagunia is heavily pregnant and trying to cross the treacherous, rocky mountain to bring Dashrath his lunch because he's working far away on the road construction site.
She slips on the loose stones, falls down a deep crevice, smashes her leg badly, and the camera just lingers on her dropped tiffin box spilling lentils and flatbread all over the jagged gray rocks while dramatic strings swell up on the soundtrack.
Because the damn mountain stands right in the middle between their remote village and the nearest town with a hospital, poor Phagunia can't get any medical help in time, and she sadly dies from her injuries right there, leaving Dashrath completely heartbroken and shattered.
So then he grabs a hammer and a crowbar, walks right up to the base of the gigantic mountain that killed his wife, and starts chipping away at the hard stone out of pure grief and anger, and the villagers think he's completely lost his mind.
He keeps hammering away day after day, year after year, refusing to stop even when the local villagers mock him, throw stones at him, call him a madman, and tell him it's impossible to carve a path through solid rock with just hand tools.
Along the way, there's this weirdly placed song and dance sequence where everyone in the village suddenly starts singing and dancing around him like a festive mela, which totally breaks the gritty tone for a few minutes before we jump right back into the suffering and the sweat.
Years pass by in a blink, and Dashrath just keeps swinging that hammer, getting older, skin leathered by the sun, his hair wild and graying, totally obsessed with his crazy mission to connect his isolated village to the outside world.
Ruplal Yadav tries to beat him up and stop him multiple times because keeping the village isolated gives the landlord total feudal control over the poor lower-caste residents, but Dashrath refuses to back down even when he gets brutally beaten bloody in the dirt.
He walks all the way to New Delhi to petition the government officials about the road, carrying his petition papers in a cloth bundle, and he even gets hit by a train on the way back, but somehow he survives and drags himself back to his mountain to keep hitting the rock.
By the time twenty-two long years have finally dragged on, Dashrath strikes the very last stone near the opposite side of the ridge, breaking through the final barrier and completing a clear, wide pathway right through the heart of the mountain.
The entire village gathers around in stunned silence to watch the sunlight pour through the newly carved gap for the very first time, realizing the madman was actually right all along.
Dashrath collapses from sheer exhaustion on the dusty ground right inside the newly opened pathway, surrounded by the cheering villagers and children running through the tunnel, and he passes away peacefully with a faint smile on his face.
Radhika Apte has a way of blinking that tells you she is thinking about something entirely different from what her character is supposed to be feeling, and it saves a dozen scenes in Manjhi - The Mountain Man from dissolving into standard rural melodrama. Ketan Mehta has never been a subtle director, which is fine, because subtlety is generally just a polite word for hesitation when you are dealing with a story about a guy who took a hammer and a chisel to a literal mountain because his wife died on the other side of it. Bollywood movies usually prefer their historical obsessives either manic or saintly, but Dasrath Manjhi, as written by Mehta and a team of four other screenwriters who clearly spent too many hours arguing about third-act pacing, is neither. He is just loud and dusty and irritatingly persistent.
Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays him with that same jumpy, cornered energy that made his Gangs of Wasseypur turn so memorable, though here he has to age across twenty years without the benefit of much prosthetic work beyond some grey streaks in his beard and a permanent squint. He yells a lot. He throws rocks. He carries Radhika Apte's Phagunia on his back across jagged slate that looks suspiciously like painted thermocol in wide shots, which is a small thing but it bugged me every single time the camera pulled back too far. The screenplay structure jumps around in time like a nervous cricket, flashing back to the feudal atrocities of Dhanbad in the sixties before cutting back to the heavy breathing and the metallic *clack* of iron against granite. It gets exhausting. Not great, not bad, just there for long stretches where the narrative logic completely stalls out.
Pankaj Tripathi shows up as the local landlord, or zamindar, and he plays it with the exact same oily, half-smirking menace he brings to every other period picture he has been in for the last decade, chewing the betel nut and the scenery with equal enthusiasm. When he squares off against Siddiqui in the village square, you can feel the entire crew leaning in behind the monitors because these two actors operate on an instinctive frequency that bypasses the clunky dialogue altogether. They don't need the heavy-handed voiceover that keeps telling us how oppressive the caste system is because their posture does the heavy lifting. The cinematography by Rajeev Jain relies far too heavily on aggressive color grading that turns the Bihar dust into a radioactive orange soup, but occasionally he finds a tight, suffocating angle on Siddiqui’s blistered palms that makes you want to drop your popcorn.
Hindi movies love a good biographical struggle, but they usually sand down the edges until the protagonist looks like a moral pamphlet rather than a human being. Manjhi resists that clean finish just enough to stay interesting. The love story between Manjhi and Phagunia doesn't have much room to breathe because the film is in an almighty rush to get to the mountain-carving part, which takes up a massive chunk of the middle hour and features a repetitive editing rhythm that uses the exact same sound effect for the chisel hitting stone about four hundred times too many. You start to wonder if the sound designer had only one track saved on his hard drive. Still, Apte brings a quiet, grounded gravity to her scenes that prevents Siddiqui’s performance from boiling over into self-parody.
The themes of the picture are about as subtle as a brick through a stained-glass window, hammering away at individual will versus systemic neglect, but there are moments of strange, lyrical weirdness that elevate it above standard issue streaming fare. A subplot involving a stray dog and a hallucination of the dead wife walking alongside the dust clouds feels like it wandered in from a different, far stranger art-house picture. Then the heavy brass score kicks in again to remind us we are watching a biopic about grit and determination. It’s that old split personality that haunts so many big Hindi films, torn between wanting to be a gritty social document and a crowd-pleasing fable with a whistle-worthy background cue.
By the time the twenty-two years of stone-breaking are done and the path is finally cleared, you feel like you have been hit over the head with a sledgehammer, which is probably the point. Siddiqui gives a final speech to a gathered crowd of villagers that nearly slips into pure corniness, but he saves it at the very last second by looking away from the camera and spitting into the dirt. That refusal to deliver the clean, triumphant movie star grin is what makes the whole thing stick in your craw long after the credits roll on a soundtrack that overstays its welcome.