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In the 1980s and 90s, we had a steady stream of films about an outsider coming to a broken home, and uniting everyone. Visu almost perfected this template. We saw it happen in the 90s and 2000s too where the setting of the home was extended to a college, a workplace, a village, etc… Basically, Indian cinema loves its feel-good family entertainer space where there are clashes of ego, but all’s well that ends well. There was a time when M Rajesh could effectively milk these situations, and effortlessly conjure hilarious scenes with his oddball protagonists. There was a time when he soared past the generic nature of the central plot, and neatly wrapped it all up with his brand of comedy. Unfortunately, hardly any of this happens in his latest film Brother.
On a rather simplistic level, Brother is about Karthi (Jayam Ravi), who plays an extension of his conscientious character from Nimirndhu Nil. Despite saying the right things and abiding by the law, he runs into hot water with everyone around, who seem to be comfortable cutting corners. After one issue too many, he is packed off to Ooty to spend time with his sister Anandhi’s (Bhumika) family. In the next scene, we see his sister’s sister-in-law Archana (Priyanka Mohan) get all googly-eyed around him. Why? We will cut to a song in a moment. But before that, we are introduced to the oddball characters of his sister’s in-laws. There’s her father-in-law and district collector Sivagurunathan (Rao Ramesh), who has a bloated ego, and a misplaced superiority complex. There’s her mother-in-law and advocate Hemamalini (Saranya Ponvannan), who prefers speaking English and is an animal rights activist. There’s her husband and forest officer Aravind (Natty), who is selfish and a daddy’s boy. Then, yeah, there’s Archana, who is a doctor. And now, we go for the song.
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Anyway, Karthi is up to no good in Brother because he doesn’t have a bone of patience. What should have been a conversation ends up in a fisticuff allowing Rajesh to introduce Dr Vinay (Sathish Krishnan), who is just willfully annoying. Nevertheless, one thing leads to another, and Karthi is hated by everyone in the house, of course, except Anandhi and Archana. Like, even his nephew and niece want him to go back to Chennai. And that is more sensible than what all of the adults do over the course of 150-odd minutes in Brother.
What really proves to be the undoing of Brother is that none of the underlying issues within his sister’s family is actually solved in the film. They just make up and move on, which would have actually happened even without the presence of Karthi. When the titular character is inconsequential for the narrative, then it just screams of a lack of coherence. In fact, the writing is so disappointing that a series of scenes happen without leaving any kind of emotional impact. And the one layer of writing that had the most potential to become something is dealt with alarming insensitivity. Of course, there is a customary line towards the end to assuage things, but it was extremely caustic to say the least.
Even if everything else goes against him, Rajesh always manages to have a few stretches of jokes going in his favour. Even in Brother, there are a few scenes that could have been much more, but somehow, stop short of being laugh-out-loud funny. Take, for instance, the scene involving MS Bhaskar, VTV Ganesh and Jayam Ravi. Now, there is an attempt at humour there, but it is soon juxtaposed with a serious scene that suddenly wants to add gravitas to VTV Ganesh’s role. In fact, while we do understand why Sivagurunathan is all kinds of disappointed with Karthi, none of the other characters of his household have even the slightest of reasons to antagonise him. And the explanations for the same are banal at best.
Jayam Ravi is forced to do all the heavy lifting in Brother, and the only character that is well-developed to support him is Sivagurunathan. Others, including the ever-dependable Saranya Ponvannan and Achyuth Kumar are handed a raw deal. On the other hand, Ravi and Ramesh are terrific in the scenes that pit them against each other, and they lend the film a surprising sense of gravitas that keeps the narrative going. While this equation is straight out of the Kadhal Sadugudu (2003) playbook, the film would have immensely gained from not adopting the same ploys we saw 21 years back. In fact, this is a continuous problem in Brother because the film suffers from the middling usage of these age-old tropes and cliches. Yes, families and their structure are the same, and the frailties of ego hasn’t changed much over the years. But, a film still needs to inject a sense of freshness to the proceedings and not allow the audience to go on their own nostalgic tangent to a time when they saw similar things but with better pizazz.
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Again, cliches exist for a reason… they work. And Rajesh knew his way around the stereotypes by using witty dialogues, and straight-faced protagonists supported by an in-form Santhanam. There was a time when he knew when to step back, when to throttle, and when to accelerate. But then, there came a time when the filmmaker just couldn’t press his thumb on what was going wrong. It wasn’t like he never stopped trying to come out of the slump. However, Brother is just another disappointing addition to these attempts to reclaim past glory, and all we can do is probably send him an SMS saying its okay, Boss, we will always have OKOK.
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