Madhavan plays GD Naidu, the Edison of India. His long and complicated legacy is certainly a story worth telling, but this film tries to stuff in too much and the result feels like information rather than emotion. That’s the basic storyline and the quick review. A longer analysis follows, and it may contain spoilers.
It’s 1914. It’s night. It’s a small, deserted road. A Britisher is having trouble with his motorbike. A young man helps him, and the Britisher is amazed that this Indian knows so much and that he also wants to buy the vehicle. The young man is GD Naidu, played by Teejay Arunasalam and, later, by R Madhavan. What the Britisher doesn’t yet know is that GDN does not want the bike just to ride it. He wants to dismantle it and see how the machine works. Slowly, GDN manages to collect the money he needs to buy the bike, but he runs into farmers who are protesting because their landlords won’t increase their wages. Without second thought, GDN hands over the amount he has carefully saved, so that these farmers can have something to live on. This is the best stretch of GDN, directed by Krishnakumar Ramakumar. It tells us about the entrepreneurial and scientific genius known as the Edison of India. It also tells us about the man.
This is a much-needed movie. If The Odyssey can make people interested in Homer, a biopic on GDN could do the same for this unsung hero who was dismissed as a terrorist, a traitor, a tax evader. And information-wise, there’s a lot to take away. GDN was nothing if not enterprising. His mind was always working. He sees a woman using a comb to remove lice from a little girl’s hair, and he invents a comb-like device to separate seeds from cotton bolls. He sees his wife with weepy eyes while chopping onions, and he invents a device to do the same job. He won an award in Germany, and he shook Hitler’s hand. He tried to set up a plant to manufacture Benz cars in Coimbatore. But often, his efforts were thwarted by people who either hated him, or tax officers like the character played by Jayaram. This man is not evil. He just likes to do things by the book, and he does not like it that GDN makes his own rules.
But the film tries to pack in too much and the result is a series of hasty highlights instead of an organically narrated life story. In an early scene, GDN’s wife Chellamma says she worries about the bigness of his dreams. Later, when his dreams have become even bigger than she could have imagined, she advises him to marry someone who can be with him and support him the way he needs. And the next scene, we see Madhavan getting married to Dushara Vijayan. The emotional underpinnings of these decisions, these events never come across, because the film is in a hurry to record GDN’s next achievement. At another point, a Britisher says that they’ve lost the treason case against GDN. An entire set of potentially dramatic scenes is reduced to a single line of dialogue in a hastily edited scene. And when the drama does arrive, in the form of a dog or a wife who asks for a divorce or an auction scene, the staging and the timing flatten everything out.
There’s a huge cast, including Sathyaraj, Priyamani, Vinay Rai, Aditi Balan, Karunakaran. Many of them are reduced to deliverers of reaction shots, and many of them seem to be “in costume”, as though dressed up in their wigs and makeup just before a school play – especially the characters of Periyar and MR Radha and so forth. For an ambitious biopic, the production values are quite ordinary. And because they’ve tried to stuff in so much, there’s no real sense of the passage of time. At one point, GDN’s son is a baby. A few scenes later, he is all grown-up. Madhavan, with his experience, salvages his part somewhat, but the other actors look adrift, submitting to whatever acting impulse struck them at that point. Even if the screenplay had just stuck to the tax evasion part, we might have had a solid story with the Jayaram character as a principled antagonist. But in trying to tell it all, they’ve reduced a fascinating and complex man to a Wikipedia entry.
