Before Madharaasi, examining the social issue based commercial cinema of A R Murugadoss

A R Murugadoss with Sivakarthikeyan from Madharaasi shooting days

The Vijaykanth-starrer Ramana saw the director adopt a vigilante narrative and try his ‘idea based’ approach to larger-than-life commercial cinema, following the storytelling model perfected by S Shankar with his films like Gentleman, Indian, Mudhalvan, among others. The film saw Murugadoss follow the Shankar playbook of formulating his screenplay around a vigilante figure, who is out to question a system that is entrenched in corruption. Ramana, in retrospect, seems too much like a Shankar film in places, and you get the conniving government officials, caricaturist representations of corrupt bureaucrats, and a one-man fight against an unsympathetic system. The film uses the fight against bureaucratic red tape and corruption through a vigilante archetype that was Shankar’s forte in Tamil cinema till that point, and made it the beginning of an issue-based filmmaking streak in Murugadoss that has become more and more unhinged over the years.

Murugadoss then went on to the next step, working within genre confines to make passing references to child sex trafficking rings in his Indianized riff on Christopher Nolan’s Memento, with Suriyah starrer “Ghajini” in the year 2005. There are dark undertones to balance out the love story that is the beating heart of the film. A protagonist with anterograde amnesia is forced to find out his lover’s killer with the help of a young woman with ulterior motives of her own. Ghajini is as mainstream a film as Murugadoss has ever made, with colorful song and dance numbers, stylish action choreography, and a timeless romance holding it all together. But in between all that, Murugadoss can’t help but insert the angle of the villain being the head of a child trafficking network, and looking back at the severity with which Ghajini captures the kinds of crimes that occur under such outfits, it’s still refreshing, considering the family-friendly tag of these films.

Murugadoss has never been politically astute in his narrative observations or has rarely dealt with political rhetoric in his films with much nuance. But his films have always had a progressively present arc of integrating serious societal concerns into the larger umbrella of routing fan service. He comes up with legitimate problems plaguing our national consciousness and tries successfully and in some case unsuccessfully (read Sarkar and Darbar) to instill them into the inciting incidents of crowd pleasing action vehicles. The problems faced by farmers, water shortage in rural areas, threat posed by domestic terrorism, drug mafia and even international conspiracies around biological warfare against India, have been all themes that he has tapped into many of his major films. With Murugadoss, over the years, as much as his handling of action sequences and his patiently elegant setup for showy ‘theatre moments’, audiences have come to be curious about what specific social vice he is going to examine with each film. That has become the unique selling point of Murugadoss films for a long time.

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The director showcases the angsty impulses of common man’s cinema that is expected to raise uncomfortable questions and present scenarios of our deteriorating values system through formulaic stories of heroism. He does not hold back in his social commentary and goes all out with lengthy monologues and speeches making important yet self congratulatory points like the media live scene from Vijay starrer ‘Kaththi’, public gatherings and speeches in Sarkar and many more impactful scenes. Murugadoss also draws in the viewers implicit involvement in the proceedings by always cutting away to ordinary people responding to the societal problems being addressed by the hero on TV, radio and other devices as an audience surrogate to drive home the emotional weight of the data being presented on real world problems, between all the ‘commercial cinema” moments.

A R Murugadoss deals with the broadest strokes when it comes to the social consciousness in his films. He usually deals with a single tragic event, like a mass killing or major accident as the inflection point which tends to move the hero towards their destined choices to pursue the savior arc. But what makes this approach really stand out in Murugadoss films is the fact that he is process-oriented in socially consciousness story arcs and presents the mundane, operational details of its aftermath. For instance in Thuppakki, an outwardly stylized action film about a soldier coming for holiday, who is forced to solve the puzzle of a nationwide terrorist plot, Murugadoss is not worried much about boring you with the details of as to how ‘sleeper cells’ work and how they go about setting it up a terrorist attack. Each side player and link in the bigger chain is dealt with in the films, without bypassing the urgency of the crisis.

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He trusts the audiences to keep up with the information overload and specificity of the milieu, banking on our ability to follow through these details linearly and try to solve the puzzle simultaneously while taking in all the pleasures of the action set pieces. A lesser director would bypass several details and just work within the generic beats and use all the screen time to hype up the hero. But Murugadoss understands the importance of engaging viewers with grounded stories of the easy triumph of good vs evil machinations in blockbuster story structures and doesn’t mess with that aspect of his film. Every character quirk, side detail come to fruition in the films of A R Murugadoss within the confines of the larger social issue being addressed in the films. In Kaththi, the personal redemption of ‘Kathiresan’ is a microcosm of the political clarity  the movie derives in the course of the run time. It starts off from a point of complacent passivity and grows to being a sufficiently engaged change agent, which is the central narrative decision for the hero’s journey and this is also a political awakening of the film in many ways.

In ‘Ezham Arivu’, a complicated story of re-birth, the much contested legacy of  ‘Bodhi Dharma’ with sci-fi affectations, Murugadoss makes the complication even more profound by bringing in the angle of bio warfare pre-empting the discussions we were having at the time of COVID-19, back in 2011 itself. These are not mere after-thoughts in his films but his approach to making hollow blockbuster films means something more than the sum of its parts. Murugadoss is actually invested in the issues being discussed. He locates the beating heart of the sensitive topic and addresses it head on without holding back on the geo-political ramifications of such ‘out of left field’ plotting. There is a search for answers and equitable solutions for the problems addressed as opposed to being mere convenient screenwriting engines to drive the main narrative forward. In Sarkar, through the character of a millionaire whose vote was stolen in the local election, Murugadoss tried to hang the political talking points of a common man’s leader, rising. Though the messaging gets preachy and Vijay and Murugadoss indulges in hyper dramatic sloganeering, the ‘call for action’ mode of filmmaking is a welcome departure from the sugar coated blockbusters, which use politics are marketing tools.

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In an age where filmmakers like Pa Ranjith, Vetrimaaran and Mari Selvaraj are redefining the way in which mainstream cinema can tackle and obfuscate sensitive social issues within genre conventions, with nuance and delicate attention, Murugadoss’s old school, ‘wishy washy’ style loaded with optimism and naive sincerity might look outdated to a discerning viewer. But that is an issue with the time period in which he made his entry into films where the visceral, sensitive politics were relegated to being problems to be dealt with by the more off beat films. As a filmmaker who came up on a steady diet of Shankar films and morality plays from the 80s and 90s, A R Murugadoss is more inclined to treat the social conditions as a necessary tool in his storytelling. He eschews the tropes of mainstream cinema through reworking the template of mistaken identity and coming of age tales, work as pieces of a larger societal concern and making observational, basic yet essential commentary on headlines that trend in our news cycles, as opposed to just stories of individual heroism. 

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