Drama

There is an evident aimlessness and laziness all over the movie Drama. It is not that this movie demands such a treatment. But the script here is just going on and on with charmless sequences and very sporadically there are routine dialog jokes that are trying to save the movie from being an absolute dud.  Mohanlal is trying hard to recreate his vintage charm, but with a script like this, all those expressions look pointless.

So from the posters, some of you might have got an idea that there is a funeral happening in this movie. Rosamma, an elderly woman from Kattappana is now with her daughter in London. One day she had her last breathe and their sons and daughters except the younger son Jomon decide to cremate her body in London against her will to be cremated in Kattappana near her husband’s grave. So Drama basically shows us how a funeral event manager Raju helps Jomon in fulfilling Rosamma’s last wish.

If you ask me how this movie was to me in terms of excitement in treatment, I would say it pretty much reminded me of watching Kadal Kadannu Oru Mathukutty where I was occasionally laughing for humor bits but was clueless about what the movie was about and remained clueless even after watching the movie. Here in Drama, Ranjith is struggling hard to make everything look connected and exciting. His agenda is to expose the money-oriented thankless attitude of the kids towards their parents. But to show that he has written a script that is all over the place and a lot of it felt really unnecessary, for example, the whole family backdrop of Raju. The description the movie gives to the central event itself has certain bizarre logic and the director might claim that it is the behavior of the characters in that particular situation.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BpoaRMDBMIj/

Mohanlal isn’t bad here, but he is sort of forced to bring back his old vibrant humor path just to make the movie looking exciting. And to be honest there are times we will really feel the movie utilizing that, to be interesting. Arundathi Nag who was previously seen here in Da Thadiya as the cool grandmother reprises a similar character and she was fine. Asha Sharath is given a character that doesn’t look relevant at all to the story. Kaniha is just okay as Mercy and Niranj Suresh couldn’t really pull off the character of Jomon. Baiju and Johny Antony are the main comedic relief. Dileesh Pothan is also there in a major role in his usual style. Suresh Krishna, Tini Tom, Renji Panicker, Shyamaprasad, Jaffer Idukki etc are the other actors here.

When you script, you may have plot points that need to be connected gracefully to form a story. In Drama, I feel Ranjith only had three such points; the beginning, interval and the end. Everything else happening in between doesn’t have any sort of grace to their credit. It gives a feeling that most of the scenes happening in between where stuffed in to make the movie lengthy. When I backtrack the whole film, I really don’t get an answer for the decision to give so much emphasis on that Tamilian neighbor. That’s just one example. There are a few more such loose subplots in the movie including the second teaser of the movie. There isn’t a single clap worthy moment in Drama and the small laughs are mainly because of the dialogue humor and some of the gimmicks done by Mohanlal. The cinematography isn’t really doing anything particularly interesting and I felt the editor should have chopped off a lot of minimal bits. Bijibal’s background score felt excessive at many points.

Drama is a dull and boring preach/ satire on certain societal notions. It has this scattered screenplay that tries to make everything look like an eventful thing like a Priyadarshan comedy but fails to get the right result. This one is recommended for those who felt that Mathukutty is an underrated gem.

Rating: 2/5