Bollywood comedy blockbuster: pee jokes and wholesome life values

Rating: 8/10 (30 January 2010)

Released around Christmas 2009 in over half a dozen countries '3 Idiots' , reportedly the highest grossing Bollywood movie of all time, earned $70 million worldwide within 18 days of entering theaters. It was also officially released early to YouTube, another first. In the US, where it's being being shown at AMC/Regal theaters, it made $5.5 million in its first 17 days, the highest US take for a Bollywood import.
So what is this paragon? No 'Slumdog,' it's much more a standard commercial Indian film product. That means it's long, it's got tears, laughter, excitement, music and dance, and homilies about work and family. It's got romance, a beautiful girl who finds the hero in the end, and it's got running pee and fart and bum jokes. The screenplay of '3 Idiots' is drawn from Chetan Bhagat's 2004 bestseller Five Point Someone, a novel initially published in English and later reissued in Hindi. Bhagat's novel deals with the college exam angst and romance issues of three student buddies. But the film goes further afield, including childbirth during a blackout due to a monsoon flood, travels through gorgeous mountain landscapes of Ladakh seen from the air, trips back and forth over the period of a decade, one marvelous scene when a professor's mass of equations and symbols float off the blackboard up into the lecture hall, caressing the students. There are several full-dress Bollywood song-and-dance numbers, one in a hospital. The bright-colored cinematography is pleasant to look at. '3 Idiots' is virtually an epic of shared coming-of-age experiences with wholesome messages. These are: be true to yourself, live your dream. Be positive: the hero's mantra is "Aal izz well." Don't cheat -- unless you have to in a good cause. Don't rely on memorizing stuff; think for yourself. Avoid obsessing about the price and value of things. Remember where you came from. Remember your friends. The pressures of school in India where it may be the only way out of poverty are made clear, including the high incidence of suicide among students.
And learn Hindi. There's a sequence when a nerdy materialist who lived abroad and didn't study it much is chosen to give a public address in a high-falutin literary form of the language, ending up with some lines in Sanscrit, which he's even more ignorant of. The buddies inject naughty substitute homonyms like the equivalent of "screw" for "serve" and he becomes a laughing stock.
It's this materialistic memorizer bloke, Chatur Ramalingam (Omi Vaidya), who starts off the pre-title sequence by calling Farhan Qureshi (R. Madhavan) to say he's located their engineering school pal "Rancho" (Aamir Khan) who disappeared after graduation. Farhan has to take the annoying and materialistic Chatur along as he rounds up best buddy Raju Rastogi (Sharman Joshi) to drive from New Delhi up to the mountain town of Shimla to find Rahcho, the pal who influenced and inspired them so much. Much of the film consists of flashbacks along the trip of all the many incidents that happened in engineering school, many involving the annoying and sadistic school principal Viru Sahastrabuddhe (Boman Irani), AKA "Virus," who has a beautiful daughter, Pia (Kareena Kapoor).
The mercurial and diminutive Khan is so talented he gets away with playing Rancho as a student even though he's forty-something. Rancho is a compelling character: he's the inspiration, the catalyst a young person needs to move beyond his origins and live his dreams. Farhan is from a middle class family and has a huge talent for nature photography; his dad has pushed him toward engineering but he hates it. Raju comes from a dirt poor family -- images of his sick father, unmarried sister, and failing mom are in old-movie black and white -- and the way the family's future is resting on his engineering degree so terrifies him that he continually panics and fails the school tests. But he's a tremendously decent, soulful fellow whose rigorous honesty ultimately wins over potential employers. Rancho, whose origins are as obscure as his brilliance is evident, bows to no one and gets away with all kinds of infringements of the rules because or his inventive mind and fundamental decency.
This summary barely scratches the surface. '3 Idiots' moves with precipitous speed through a dizzying array of incidents. A puzzling surprise comes just before the mid-way "Interval." And I said it was long. With that "Interval," the movie keeps you in the theater for three full hours. That's a lot of Hindi, and only a little English. But this feels like a cleansing, warm bath after Judd Apatow and Eddie Murphy. This is good entertainment, and it's neither mindless nor nasty. But is it art? Is it groundbreaking? No, one couldn't say that. It's just a breath of good humor and good sense from a more innocent place.