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BLINDED BY THE LIGHT
Director: Gurinder Chadha Cast: Viveik Kalra, Kulvinder Ghir, Nell Williams, Aaron Phagura, Dean-Charles Chapman, Meera Ganatra, Nikita Mehta, Tara Divina, Rob Brydon, Hayley Atwell MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:57 Release Date: 8/16/19 |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 15, 2019 The well-meaning but thoroughly generic Blinded by the Light tells the old story of a young man who feels trapped in a small town, hindered by a disapproving parent, and certain of what he wants to do but uncertain about how to do it. He is, for all intents and purposes, your average angsty teenager, who might do something worthwhile someday, if only he believes in himself enough. Stories like this are a dime a dozen, and movies like this are almost as frequent. They need some kind of hook—something that separates one, ordinary story about a teen who could make it, if only he worked up the nerve to do it, from the countless others like it. The gimmick for this one is that Javed (Viveik Kalra), a first-generation immigrant to the UK from Pakistan, becomes obsessed with Bruce Springsteen. He's kind of annoying about it, too. This, of course, can be forgiven to an extent, because all of us have probably had that one thing—a series of books, the albums of a band or a musician, a set of movies, a few TV shows—that seemed to preoccupy far too much of our youth. You could quote a passage, a lyric, or a line of dialogue on demand, and it sure did seem that the object or objects of your obsession had all the answers—right there in plain sight or hidden away in some meaning that only you could decipher. It was exciting to discover those meanings, because it felt as if someone knew something about you, even though you'd probably never meet the person. One of the keys to growing up, perhaps, is in realizing that the fixations of our youth probably didn't have all the answers. Maybe they just had the right answers at the time. Maybe the real point of believing that some stranger could understand what you're going through is to realize that there are other people in the world going through similar things. The world isn't just about you, but you do have something to contribute to the world in telling your story in some way. That's kind of the point of this movie, written by Paul Mayeda Berges, director Gurinder Chadha, and Sarfraz Manzoor. It's based on Manzoor's memoir Greetings from Bury Park. In a way, then, we know that the real-life Javed would eventually learn that his story could mean something to people beyond himself. It could help people find their place, in the same way that Javed hearing "Dancing in the Dark" for the first time, alone and despondent in his bedroom, helped him find some meaning confined to but also beyond his own life. The movie gets to that point—kind of and eventually. To get there, though, one has to do some narrative and thematic algebra, after experiencing a coming-of-age story that's rather shoddily assembled from a storytelling and filmmaking perspective. Most of the story takes place in 1987, after a prologue focusing on Javed's friendship with a neighbor who becomes almost a non-factor in most of the movie. There are many such ideas and subplots here, from the friend/neighbor Matt (Dean-Charles Chapman), whose taste in music is far from Springsteen and who gets mad when Javed dares to insult that fact, to Eliza (Nell Williams), a politically active classmate who's Javed's first kiss and then is mostly forgotten until the climax, when everything Javed has messed up has to be put right. The politics of the era, from Margaret Thatcher's apparent disinterest in the working class to far-right nationalists roaming the streets to abuse immigrants, come into play, although mostly when the movie needs some conflict of significance. The bulk of the story is the teenager's relationship with his father Malik (Kulvinder Ghir), who brought his family to the town of Luton from Pakistan and now, about a decade later, is laid off from his job at a car factory for his trouble. Javed wants to become a writer, but his father would rather that he get a stable job. When a classmate lets him borrow a couple of Springsteen cassette tapes, with the lyrics spinning around his head or projected against a wall while he stands in a wind storm, Javed's sense of purpose becomes clearer. That's when it all becomes about Springsteen—the music, the lyrics, the dismay that people haven't really listened to him, the constant quoting, the sporadic moments when Chadha turns a song into a half-hearted musical number. Javed starts defining just about everything by the measure of Springsteen. While amusing and thoughtful at first (Those initial moments of Javed hearing the songs for the first time are clever in portraying their impact, and there's some discussion about why Springsteen's music would appeal to anyone having a tough go at it), the whole of Javed's story becomes more about his attachment to someone else than his own experiences. Those experiences mean something. There's an actual story, potentially involving and relevant, in them. Blinded by the Light, though, is here for the Springsteen gimmick and a Big Speech to tell us what the movie forgot to say. Copyright © 2019 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for thematic material and language including some ethnic slurs)
