Mark Reviews Movies: HOTEL MUMBAI

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 28, 2019

The experience of Hotel Mumbai is to watch what happens and to wrestle with why the movie has been made. It's an exceptionally crafted movie, dramatizing the details of a real-life terrorist attack in Mumbai in November of 2008. Director Anthony Maras, making his feature debut, displays complete control over the story's various pieces.

It follows the attackers, as they separate and make their way through densely populated locales in the southern part of the city. It follows a selection of characters, both real and fictionalized, as they try to survive within the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. The movie also details how the local police were unprepared for a military-style attack such as this one, which resulted in the attack lasting for three days.

We're never at a loss in understanding how this happened, both in terms of the horrifying strategy of the attack and the failure of preparation within the government. Most of the story takes place inside the hotel. Even though we're never given any explicit detail of the building's floorplan, Maras somehow ensures that we're always aware of where the attackers are in relation to the staff members and guests, how the survivors plan to hide or escape based on the attackers' movements, and the basic layout of the hotel, based simply on dialogue and action.

Maras even cuts away to actual new broadcasts from the event, so that, when an explosion occurs, we see where it happened from the exterior of the building. Such archival footage also guarantees that we never suspect Maras is exaggerating the re-creation. We see an explosion dramatized, and then we see it as it actually happened. There's no embellishment, as far as we can tell, because no embellishment is necessary in the face of ugly reality.

As a piece of logistical filmmaking, the movie is an unqualified success. It makes sense of the chaos of these days of terror—or at least as much sense as such horror can make—while never losing the sense that the attack was little more than violent chaos, roughly planned but performed by people who were single-minded in killing as many as possible. That, along with the helplessness of the intended victims and the absence of a prepared response to this kind of attack, was all that was required for a group of 10 men, indoctrinated into a perverted view of Islam and armed with automatic rifles and grenades, to kill at least 166 people and to wound more than additional 300.

The experience of watching all of this unfold is consistently horrifying. That's the point, of course, but it also seems to be the only point. Besides seeing what we already know to be sickening play out in excruciating detail, what is there to be gained from such a re-creation? That's the question that keeps running through one's mind while watching body after body fall to gunfire.

Maras and co-screenwriter John Collee do give us a select group of characters whose lives and stories are important within the attack. Obviously, we have a reason to care about the fates of new parents David (Armie Hammer) and Zahra (Nazanin Boniadi), who spend the story trying to protect their baby, as well as Arjun (Dev Patel), a waiter at the hotel, who repeatedly risks his life to save guests, while his wife and infant wait for him at home. The other most significant characters are Vasili (Jason Isaacs), a cynical Russian businessman, and head chef Hemant Oberoi (Anupam Kher), who gets diners to a secure location inside the hotel (He is, perhaps, the one character who exactly matches a real-life person).

What, though, does this focus on a select group of characters say about those other lives—all of the anonymous victims, whom we briefly see in a state of sheer terror before they're murdered? Are these people somehow less important? It would be unfair to suggest that the filmmakers intentionally set out to even imply such a notion, but intended or not, we're left with that impression to some degree.

This is just the beginning of the questions surrounding the attempt to dramatize such an event. As much as Maras attempts to find the humanity among these victims and survivors, through their fear and their heroism and their basic desire to live, the overriding feeling of the movie is one of inhumanity.

For every act of courage or sacrifice, there are multiple moments of death without meaning. Two clerks, held at gunpoint, are ordered to call rooms and lie that the people knocking on the door are rescuers. One of the women does and, after refusing to lure another person to his or her death, is executed. The other refuses entirely and is killed immediately. How do we even begin to process such an impossible decision? The movie cannot, and to its credit, it does not attempt to.

We're still forced to watch the scene, though, as just another vignette of cruelty and hopelessness. The argument for showing it, as well as the countless other instances of such violence, is that it happened. Hotel Mumbai, though, is not reality. It's a reproduction of reality, calculated in its choices of what to show, whom to focus on, and what meaning we're meant to take from it. The movie's craft is impeccable. The purpose behind that craft, though, is dubious.

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