Like the characters within, Midnight’s Children is both blessed and cursed. The former are afflicted by their circumstantial births at the stroke of midnight on August 14, 1947, a moment that signifies India’s independence from Britain as well as the separation into two countries, India and Pakistan. The strife here is enough, but within the film, the issue itself often feels more like a vehicle to inorganically inject symbolism. While much of the film focuses on the lives of two young boys who are switched at birth, placing an affluent born into a life of penury and one initially destined for poverty into a life of comfort, the fantastical element of the midnight birth becomes less and less important as the film goes on, and the viewer realizes that both boys and the conflicts with their parents and the elder generation would have existed regardless, whether they were born at midnight, six weeks later, or two years prior.
It seems that the adolescent with newfound freedoms, out from under colonial rule, and unfamiliar with the India / Pakistan union would conflict with the older generation regardless of when they were born, no?
And this is where the film – and its symbols – are both blessed and cursed, but this time because it is based on a Salman Rushdie novel. Rushdie, who is credited with the screenplay, is notorious for elegantly presenting symbols and then dragging them on for pages and pages and pages, allowing them to float along a shallow narrative built on dense words and verbose sentences. I’m not necessarily certain if I can knock Rushdie for this. After all, his prose is beautiful, but it is worth noting that he was much less famous before the fatwa than after, and this would suggest that the nefariousness of the Iranian government’s reaction to the publication of Satanic Verses brought notoriety to Rushdie that might not have come otherwise, but I digress and will continue to focus on the film.
All in all, it wants desperately to be poignant, highlighting India’s independence through the first half of the film, but it never fully becomes poignant. It plays with the caste system and fate, but never really engages either. It truly wants to be an epic, but often feels much more like a basic fairy tale.