The Mahabharata

It'd be simple to say that The Mahabharata is a handsomely mounted production ...beautifully acted ...an elaborate story wonderfully told ...or any other standard bit of hyperbole that we customarily reserve for films which we respect but do not necessarily enjoy (I did enjoy the film-but I suspect that many will find it unbearably slow). And the "hyperbole" will certainly be wheeled out by the cartload for this 6-hour film adaptation of director Peter Brook's 9-hour stage play. While the film deserves the abundant praise, it also deserves more. Bringing a massive ancient epic poem to the silver screen circa 1990, and having it be something other than a SFX-extravaganza is either the work of a fool or a very courageous person. Let me return to that in a moment. The Mahabharata, a Sanskrit epic poem, which mixes mythology, religion, drama, and allegory to tell one version of the story of man's rise and fall opens with a traditional literary conceit - we meet the poet before we are introduced to the poem. In flashback, he lays out his grand design, and we follow the story of two sets of siblings: the Pandavas and the Kauravas, the former five brothers begot of the gods and a human woman, the latter, 100 sons of more earthly origin. Because greed and the thirst for power are perennials parts of human nature, the two tribes eventually come to blows over the division of their father's kingdom. In the ensuing war, they are alternately aided and foiled by the often capricious gods-particularly, in this case, Krishna. In an extremely streamlined nutshell, that is the tale. The resultant film is neither the work of a fool nor a blindly courageous person-Brook knows that ancient epic poems succeeded because the audience had a shared faith (you didn't have to necessarily believe that Zeus was your personal savior, but you did locate "ultimate reality" or "higher truth" or "God"-in generic terms-somewhere outside of yourself). That kind of underlying assumption about shared faith doesn't exist today-and because of that, some of the dialogue in The Mahabharata sounds overblown. Who, for instance, would talk today of a person's (not a nation's) "destiny"? It's just not done in polite conversation. Brook understands this, and therefore-with some regularity, but never in a way that detracts from the overall serious tone of the piece throws his audience a bit of comic relief, occasionally undercutting some of the more grandiloquent verbiage. Recognizing then, as I think we should, the quite improbable achievement of Brook, his writer Jean Claude Carriere, and a host of multiethnic and extremely talented actors and actresses (not one performance rings untrue when, by definition, they all should), The Mahabharata does accomplish the seemingly impossible. If the pace does seem, at times, a bit slow, or if the occasional threat or boast sounds stilted to modern ears, these are minor faults. Given the obstacles, The Mahabharata is, in terms of modern cinema, somewhat of a miracle. Highly recommended. (Available from: Parabola Video, 656 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.)