I put off watching 3 Idiots for longer than I should have. The concept of sitting down for a three-hour film is daunting, and consequently it got overlooked in favor of other DVDs and Blu-rays I had to review. What’s worse? I let this mindset prevail even knowing that 3 Idiots is the most celebrated and awarded film to ever come out of India. Ever. When you hear of a film sweeping the Oscars with 11 wins (Ben Hur, Titanic, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring), it’s kind of mind-blowing (if not a little tedious to watch), but 3 Idiots has it beat. It won 16 awards at the International Indian Film Academy Awards (India’s Oscar equivalent), although there are categories where 3 Idiots won that don’t exist in the Oscars which have developed in at the IIFA due to Bollywood’s focus on musical numbers. As Bollywood films go, it’s mostly deserving of its accolades.
3 Idiots plays as a flashback of Farharn (Madhavan) and Raju (Sharman Joshi), two of the idiots, summoned to the roof of a building at the Imperial College of Engineering (ICE) by their old college rival Chatur (Omi Vadiya), intent on seeing the results of a bet he made with Rancho (Aamir Khan), the third idiot. As they rewind the events that led up to the bet, they realize Rancho isn’t going to show so Farharn, Raju, and Shatur jump in a car and go to visit him in the town they’ve heard he lives in. As the past unfolds we learn more about where each of these would-be engineers headed with their life and how Rancho was more than just their friend, he was the driving force behind countless positive changes in everything they were during their formative college days. With his “All is well” mantra, Rancho touches the lives of everyone around him, including the daughter of the dean (Kareena Kapoor). Meanwhile, in present-day, a mystery begins to surface as Rancho’s true identity is called into question, making it unclear if Rancho ever had a hope of equaling Shatur and his imminent success hinging on a business deal with the most powerful engineer in India.
The three-hour story centered in the past has lots of ups and downs including suicides, births, and more. However the main point of the flashbacks, if not the entire film, is its commentary on learning and the competitive system India has put in place. The dog-eat-dog vision of success is embodied in the ICE’s dean Viru Sahastrabuddhe (Boman Irani), who proclaims the necessity of competition, repetition, and memorization as backbones of the educational system. Through it all, Rancho butts heads with the dean endorsing learning as a passion instead of just a stepping stone to success, and proving over and over that learning without joy leaves you empty and unfulfilled.
Where the film stumbles is in the back and forth nature of it all. Whether or not the 3 idiots will graduate becomes a lynchpin in the story, and for over an hour it jumps back and forth over a line where the dean has either rusticated them (expelled) or allowed them back in. It’s a tool that works at first but then loses all efficacy as we learn just how little of a risk it is for two of the three idiots. The film does a good job of outlining the financial risks, but where the cultural translation comes up for a loss, is in the importance that students place on parental expectations. American college culture, as presented in film, is one of slackers, drunks, and druggies, making it hard to fully grasp the cultural weight that has resulted in the highest student suicide rate in the world. The issue in this case isn’t so much the film’s fault as it is the cultural boundary that makes it harder to sympathize.
In judging acting performances in big Bollywood films, there’s always a camp factor you have to allow for. At points, emotions are blown up and you have to look past it as part of the genre’s style. When 3 Idiots plays it straight though, Aamir Khan delivers a great performance that perfectly meets the film’s comic and dramatic peaks. Holding the story aloft in Khan’s absence, Madhavan and Raju play the friends who stand at polar extremes of accepting Rancho’s methodology. Madhavan’s Farhan delights in the havoc that Rancho’s counterpoints cause at the ICE while Joshi’s Raju lives in fear of the repercussions, and consequently the two make a solid and believable character duo even without Rancho pushing them along.
The film uses a mixture of Hindi and English. There’s no all-English audio track, so the subtitles are a must, but they’re never distracting. Granted, it’s always weird to read subtitles when people are singing, it’s just a different cadence.
DVD Bonus Features
A fair number of featurettes are included, like featurettes about filming in location in Ladakh (which is stunningly beautiful), how Kareena Kapoor found her character, Rancho’s “All is well” philosophy, and the creation of a scene involving drinking.
"3 Idiots" is on sale April 26, 2011 and is rated PG13. Comedy, Drama, Musical. Directed by Rajkumar Hirani. Written by Vidhu Vinod Chopra. Starring Aamir Khan, Madhavan, Kareena Kapoor, Boman Irani, Sharman Joshi, Omi Vaidya.
