‘Sachin: A Billion Dreams’ delivers a safe script but it lacks soul and insight

The immaturity hits you through the voice of Harsha Bhogle, a co-narrator in the movie. His intonation, at least in the Hindi version, suggests he is talking to kids. It isn’t his fault of course for that is the audience it is addressed to.

They (the narrators and Tendulkar himself) talk about various incidents but they just mention it, and would drop in a word or two about how he was sad or happy, or whatever the feeling was. As if they are reading out headlines. Tendulkar feared tennis elbow would end his career. He is sad that he lost his captaincy. He is joyous that the World Cup was won. The soul, the meat of feeling and insight, is missing. The flesh and blood isn’t there, just bare bones. It’s left to his wife Anjali to give us some insight.

Always honest, from an emotional heart and a mature head, she hits the sweet spots. It’s she who talks about what it meant to the man. Sample the captaincy issue. Tendulkar says he was sad that it didn’t go well. That we knew already but that’s all we get from him, or from the script given to the male narrators. It’s left to Anjali to tell us how she was so bewildered in the initial days of marriage when Tendulkar would fall silent and sullen after bad days. It was as if she had made some mistake. Was he angry at her? Was it something she had done?

Or the scenes immediately after the wedding when it was decided that she, a serious medical student with aspirations, quit. In Tendulkar’s telling, it was her decision. Almost immediately, her voice fills the screen, and she says, “he said as much that one of us have to quit our careers”. Obviously, it wasn’t going to be him. The joyful moments about their relationship of how she wooed him also is told delightfully by her.

But moments like that are few and far between in the movie. For the major part, it’s Sachin-Sachin. What did he feel about those chants? Tendulkar says he was grateful. Luckily, there is a voice of a friend, (probably Atul Ranade), which explains that Tendulkar once told him that the spine-tingling chants reminded him of responsibility. Ah, if only the movie threw up more of those moments.

What about Azharuddin? A voiceover says, it’s expected that someone who was big was finding it difficult to handle the attention that went to the younger newer star. Nothing more. What about match-fixing? “I was shocked to see that people can do something like this,” offers Tendulkar.

What about Chappell. Harbhajan Singh says he was like a schoolmaster, that has been said in 100 interviews before. These are tired bytes for adults, probably not for children. For the curious, Tendulkar doesn’t delve into anything spiteful; he even skips the whole brouhaha over Rahul Dravid’s declaration before he got to his 200, by omitting the episode entirely. Presented linearly, it traces his life from a few scenes from childhood and progresses chronologically through his career, ending in that emotional retirement speech. That final speech still holds the attention, and moves the heart. But for that we could just have hit Youtube.

There is a clip from Indian dressing room when everyone is asked to say something about Tendulkar. After couple of humourous stuff from Harbhajan Singh and Anil Kumble, the camera goes to a young MS Dhoni. He blanks out, has a big pause, and says, Next next, will say later. And when it comes back to him, he smiles and says, “Boost is the secret of his energy.”

You laugh reflexively, but the inherent vacuousness hits almost immediately. That was a real-life moment and the blankness of the shy young man in awe of a legend is understandable. The movie makers had more time than that to come up with something more meaty but the ad-lines is all you get.