Jacobinte Swargarajyam

It is a story based on the life of director Vineeth Sreenivasan’s close friend, so I can’t really say that the story is too much of a fiction. Jacobinte Swargarajyam, the fourth movie from Vineeth Sreenivasan works nicely as a feel good entertainer. It isn’t over the top at any point, but at the same time it isn’t that deep to make you feel for the sufferings of the characters you see on screen.  With the aim of conveying the difficult phase of a family through light moments of fun and sentiments, the overall goodness works in favor of this film.

It is the story of a Dubai based Malayali business man Jacob Zachariah. The life was pretty smooth for his family comprising of four children. But the economy crisis that happened in 2013-2014 caused a major problem in the life of his family. Some unfortunate incidents that happened along with this crisis period shook the family and the movie shows us how they survived this phase.

May be because it is a real life incident, there isn’t much of a theatricality to the presentation. The arguments, conversations, humor, quarrel etc. feels quite real. The only major drawback in my opinion was the way they conceived the tough phase. They have tried in various ways to show us how things weren’t working for Jerry in all his attempts, but still there was something missing in the screenplay that would have made the struggle of Jerry look commendable. The sense of realism we feel helps the movie to enter a cheerful zone in the second half of the movie. It was bit filmy here and there, but it wasn’t that cheesy at the same time.

Nivin Pauly was fine playing the not so difficult character of Jerry. It is a role he could easily do looking at his growth as an actor through the other films he did. Renji Panicker was a good choice and except for a few glitches in dialogue delivery, the actor looked good on screen. Lakshmy Ramakrishnan as the mother was nice. Sreenath Bhasi in his typical careless style did justice to the character. Stacen was nice as Chris. Aima and Reba looked good, but doesn’t have much of a significant screen time in the film. The casting was pretty impressive and all the other actors like T G Ravi, Saikumar, Dinesh Prabhakar looked perfect for the roles. A special mention to Ashwin Kumar for the portrayal of Murali. No offence to Gautham Menon, looking at Menon’s cameo appearances in his own films, I don’t think he would have made the crispness Ashwin created. A few cameos are there which I don’t wish to reveal.

Coming to Vineeth Sreenivasan’s making, Jacobinte Swargarajyam doesn’t mark any remarkable style change from the director. The script written was conceived in a very neat way. He has tried to maintain realness in character equations.  As I already mentioned, if that tough phase had a little more earnestness to its credit, it would have been that feel good movie you sort of watch again and again. The dialogues were good. Jomon did a nice job with camera. Songs have already created an impact and I loved the way Malayalam Rap was used to convey the triumph of a young guy. BGMs were nice and so was the edits.

On the whole Jacobinte Swargarajyam has ups and downs for sure and it isn’t that festive mood movie. But still it has sentiments, drama and humor in a pleasing level. Overall the movie works as that okay, feel good entertainer.