Boman Irani Plays The Harmless Insufferable Man
The Mehta Boys, which released on Amazon Prime Video, recently—inadvertently exposes the toxicity of a figure most have had the displeasure of dealing with in a family
The Boman Irani-directed The Mehta Boys has been drawing much acclaim since it dropped on Amazon Prime Video last Friday. The coming-of-age dramedy follows two emotionally constipated men (Irani and Avinash Tiwary) dealing with the loss of one woman—one’s wife and another’s mother. Among the things that the film seems to get right is the depiction of the awkward relationship that many independent young men often have with their fathers. It’s heartening to see Irani and Alexander Dinelaris Jr (who also wrote the screenplay for Birdman) try to probe the difficult nature of the relationship with a delicate frankness.
Despite moments that elicit realisations of genuine joy as well as the relatable tiring mundaneness of urban life, The Mehta Boys suffers from frequent oversimplification. Be it the grief that follows the loss of a spouse, creative blocks depicted as the outcome of confining parenting—the film seems too on the nose in the portrayal of its characters’ issues. The other hurdle—the one I'm talking about here—is how it often fails to cross is the normalisation of the problematic behaviour of its older protagonist—the senior Mehta boy.
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Shiv, 71 years old, has freshly lost his wife who he was deeply in love with even after close to four decades of togetherness. Grieving, he reluctantly agrees to move to Florida with his older child Ana (Puja Sarup). But the film’s premise demands that he be held over (Ana bought his ticket using air miles and the carrier has to prioritise paying customers during a crunch). Shiv is forced to spend a weekend with his emotionally estranged son Amay (Tiwary) at his modest bachelor apartment that seems like it could crumble at any point (and it does, too).
Films trying to empathise with temperamental old men struggling after a wife’s demise aren’t anything new. It’s been a constant trope in Hollywood films like About Schmidt (2002) and A Man Called Otto (2015). Back home, the middling 2022 drama Goodbye tried to do the same with an unbelievably bad script and an unbelievably bad-natured patriarch character for Amitabh Bachchan (the actor has played a whole range of temperamentally infantile older men dependent on the women in their lives for emotional regulation—Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, Baghban, Piku being a few examples).
Bereavement can be hard but even when a story tries to conceal details that might give away the toxicity of a character, it’s never too difficult to interpret the politics of narration. In The Mehta Boys, Shiv is an insufferable geriatric who refuses to let his children help him with his bags. He is a serial nagger, chiding his son for his modern ways and dependence on technology—which, to be honest, is something the latter cannot really do anything about. He considers acting up his birthright—because if his strained relationship with his son is anything to go by, Shiv has been a drama dude throughout Amay’s childhood. I mean, if a child who you don't essentially think has done well for himself in their life, offers to lighten your load by paying the dinner bill at a restaurant, perhaps creating a scene doesn't make sense.
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The film tries to go for nuance by imbuing this character with moments of warmth and a misplaced sense of attachment. We see him make genuine attempts to bond with his son—he cooks for him, he goes grocery shopping even if he has to wade through chest-high water during the notorious Mumbai monsoon (which made me wonder why he would wear tweed jackets in that weather), he takes him and his girlfriend out for dinner. However, these seem like token afterthoughts amid the general and constant belittling he dishes out to his son—it would give anyone the ick to drive your dad around with his hand not off the handbrake for even a second. Or for your father to mock your reliance on the primary instruments of your vocation. It’s plain demeaning.
A lot of this behaviour gets normalised across South Asian households, either by way of paternal browbeating becoming a domestic norm, or angry and egotistical male behaviour being accepted as a fatherly quirk that must be made peace with. In The Mehta Boys, these icks come to the surface more readily than anywhere else because of their curation as character flaws in the script. The film tries to be mature about flaws, and about the fissures in this relationship, probably trying to convey somehow that this is how real relationships are.
To an extent, it succeeds. Shiv tries to book a hotel room after his flight gets delayed—even Amay, who has a place nearby, doesn’t seem to mind it. This happens without the faintest outward expression of discord, which goes to show how normalised the coldness between these two men related by blood is. The son seems to be fine leaving his freshly widowed father without so much as a hug or a moment of commiseration. Eventually, they share an awkward handshake.
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To its credit, the film doesn’t seem to make light of Shiv’s domineering personality completely, because the tone isn’t humorous throughout. Even if it does, one wouldn’t really be sold on his charm (or the lack of it), except Amay’s girlfriend Zara (Shreya Chaudhry), whose daughterly collusions with Shiv strangely seem to be a sort of validation of the older Mehta boy’s problematic behaviour.
Towards the end, after having gotten into an unnecessary fight with his son, stormed off into the rain and got himself into a road accident one evening—Shiv forgets all about honouring the promise made to his wife about moving in with his daughter, and returns to his house in Navsari. He’s at the crease with a cricket bat in his hand, angrily asking the bowler to bowl as fast at him as possible, torturing both—the child with the ball in his hand, and the viewer, for having put up with him for this long. The child does as asked of him, and Shiv gets hurt on the ribs, escaping a potential fatality.
Losing the will to live after the loss of a loved one is totally understandable, but why this mature-seeming septuagenarian would pick a playground with children is anybody’s guess. Or, if he is merely being his infantile, egotistical self during this scene, it's a giveaway that he's been this way with his own son, too.
What’s baffling is that it’s not just Shiv who wants all the attention for himself—the film seems to want it, too. At the end, Amay's moment of redemption comes after he listens to his father and uses pen and paper to work on his designs. It's strangely backward-looking for a film that seems fairly progressive and sensitive in its tone.