First Take | Dasvi, Bheeshma Parvam, The Eyes of Tammy Faye depict three corrupt leaders and their ideas of individual justice

In  _Dasvi,_   Abhishek Bachchan  plays the chief minister of a state resembling Haryana, who lands up in jail, only to  further his near-nil schooling through incarcerated studies. It is the role of a power-hungry politician who does not think much of breaking legs and laws, and is honest enough to face up to his own corrupt nature.

Playing the part, Abhishek Bachchan fortifies his character’s contempt for constitutional norms by showing his arrogant disregard for rules. He is clearly not aware of the green-light-red-light rules of governance.

Neither is Mammootty in his latest Malayalam release  _Bheeshma Parvam_ , where he plays a Kerala version of Don Corleone. This is probably the best adaptation of  _The Godfather_  in recent years. Unlike that other, overrated  Godfather adaptation in Malayalam,  _Malik,_  which contorts the original into unrecognisable shapes, director Amal Neerad in this film does not let us forget that this is his take on Francis Ford Coppola ’s The Godfather.

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And what a take it is! Sweeping in its melodrama, arching in its velocity and untameable in its epic ambitions,  Bheeshma Parvam hurls us into the world of Michael (no coincidence this Michael name-calling) Anjootty, kicking, dragging, and screaming. The narrative is custom-built to accommodate all the characters from The Godfather into the Malayali household. And it is all done with a chaotic perspective on the moral and ethical  dynamics of extra-constitutional violence.

Even if one is familiar with the original material, this ravishing remake takes you by surprise with its distending  temperament and a choleric enormity, whereby the violence comes in revealing welters rather than as rule. Like The Godfather, Bheeshma Parvam opens at a family function in the Anjootty household, where the Patriarch is patiently listening to an aggrieved woman’s plea for justice. It immediately recalls the prelude of the original without loitering in the fringes .

Many of the crisscrossing relationships are hard to pin down. The worst disservice that this crackling adaptation does to itself is to spin explanatory dialogues where characters ‘casually’ try to explain who they are vis-à-vis the  others in the over-populated plot. This masterly Malayali mafia movie is self-explanatory. Its muted violence is  stifling. It creates a world so tightly wound around its own heritage of successive violence that the family unit  threatens to fall apart.

[caption id=“attachment_10426111” align=“alignnone” width=“640”]  Mammootty in Bheeshma Parvam[/caption]

In Dasvi, the incarcerated chief minister Gangram Chaudhary’s thorn in the throne is his wife Bimla Devi ( Nimrat  Kaur ). The two villains in the Anjootti family out to destroy Michael’s patriarchal ascendancy are his brother-in-law and his nephew, played by Harish Uthaman and Shine Tom Chako. They gang up with a gangster from  Mumbai (Sudev Nair) to finish off Michael by slaying one of his two right-hand supports, Ami (Srinath Bhasi), who is Michael’s dead brother’s wife’s son from her second marriage approved of my Michael.

Srinath is the soul of the saga, hotheaded sentimental and romantic. His song-and-dance is so beautifully choreographed I forgave its interpolatory nature. Ami’s elder brother, played by Soubin Sahir, eventually gets a grip on the hurtling plot, bringing it to a screeching protesting halt at a point where a blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and the centre cannot hold any longer (to borrow Yeats’ vision of anarchy).

The last half-hour, where Mammootty ceases to be the frail aging Michael, and takes on adversaries man-to-man, is far too faithful a definition of textbook heroism to be eligible as an organic part of a film that tells us violence begets violence, but dammit, is nonetheless unavoidable under certain conditions.

Even with its Mammootty-glorifying climax, Bheeshma Parvam has a terrific momentum, propelled by characters who are at once Mario Puzo and Kerala.

There is a looming nativity in this homage to Sicilian codes of honour. Not all of it is equally  compelling. But even the compromised portions somehow become indicative of the human flaws that finally destroy the power structure of an extended family where violence is the key .

In The Eyes Of Tammy Faye, Jessica Chastain’s power comes not from the barrel of a gun or the power of the kursi, but from the money and clout of organised religion. From her girlhood, televangelist Tammy Faye, as  played by the extraordinarily gifted Jessica Chastain, who deservingly won the Best Actress Oscar, is shown to be an extrovert and exhibitionist while her mother (Cherry Jones) is  shown to be the anchoring factor in Tammy’s tumultuous rise in the business of selling God to the hysterical masses.

[caption id=“attachment_10498991” align=“alignnone” width=“640”]  Jessica Chastain in The Eyes of Tammy Faye[/caption]

Straightaway, let us doff our collective hats to Chastain for a rousing performance. Gloriously gut-wrenching in her pitiable belief that she is the messenger of God, Chastain’s Tammy Faye is a bit of a poseur masquerading as a sighing embodiment of the burden of shouldering the world-weariness that has been thrust on her dainty shoulders by what she calls destiny. In reality, Tammy’s success is far more manipulated than providential. Let us just say she is Meryl Streep’s Florence Foster Jenkins_,_ who knows she sings badly.

Jessica Chastain is clamorous in her go-getting glamorous avatar. The way she muscles into her husband’s gospel schemes, not allowing him to run the show without her even when she is heavily pregnant, shows that ambition is  not a masculine trait at all, that women can be killers in the cult of competitiveness. As  Tammy’ s fame grows and overtakes her husband’s, the friction between the couple is a throbbing elephant in the room. Chastain hits the shrill notes in her character’s whining, misbegotten symphony of god-steal. She is over-the-top and yet in-charge  of her character’s moral decline in ways that are hard to fine.

She makes her character fun-spirited and yet tragic. I am afraid Andrew Garfield as her husband just cannot match up to Chastain’s broad bravura performance. Perhaps by design, Garfield’s Jim Bakker comes across as a wimpy jerk. He is shown to manipulate his wife, who is clearly the star among the two, into submissiveness by  constantly threatening her with divorce.

The mix of evangelical ecstasy and bedroom tragedy is compelling, if not heady. If only director Michael Showalter had focused more on Tammy  Faye’s inner world of artificial turmoil rather than on her marriage, we would have seen a more complete portrait of a woman on the brink of a spiritual disaster.

In many ways, Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield reminded me of Lady Gaga and Adam Driver in _House Of Gucci_ . Marriage and money can be a potent mix, especially when the money is inveigled rather than inherited. Who know this better than Tammy Faye, who goes from power-driven evangelism to desperately seeking solace in a world that has (god)forsaken her.

If absolute power corrupts absolutely then these three unlikely heroes meting out justice from their appointed platforms, wielding the whip in a way that defines individual rather than constitutional justice, are the faces of a subverted governance, remarkable more for what they think they are rather than what they actually are.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram