You’ll never please everyone with a dramatization of history, but Hotel Mumbai tries its best via nparts
It may sound insensitive, but the greater the devastation of an event – be it war, natural disaster or accident – the greater the narrative possibilities for the storyteller. If you’re going to make a fact-based account of the 1996 Everest tragedy, which claimed eight lives, you’d better get your facts defensibly straight. Take on the Titanic , and you can add a sexy third-class passenger without drawing much notice.
Most cynical is the fact that the grand old five-star, built in the days of the Raj, provides a picturesque backdrop and a lot of Western faces, although Dev Patel, a British actor of Indian descent, gets top billing as hotel staffer Arjun. But it’s also worth noting that while the train-station attack was over in 90 minutes, the siege of the Taj lasted four days, which provides a better story arc.
The sprawling cast means some of the characters remain little more than sketches, including the Australian backpackers who flee one attack in a café, only to wind up in the midst of another. And I wish we could have spent more time with Anupam Kher as Oberoi, head chef and a good man in a scrape. And the film handles the depiction of the perpetrators well, showing just enough of them so they register as more than mere monsters – one of them, wounded, calls his dad – without detracting from the victims’ plight. And there are some poignant moments of resistance, as when a receptionist held at gunpoint refuses to goad guests out of their rooms. Though it wouldn’t do to characterize the attack as having a happy ending, unless you happened to survive, which was oftentimes a random event.
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