Hotel Mumbai
In the Palme d’Or-winning Elephant, writer/director Gus Van Sant followed a grapevine of characters for an hour. He tracked their days, problems, and flaws with a deadpan fascination before culminating in a Columbine-like shooting for the last 21 minutes, and while violence was the issue, it was never the centerpiece. People were the centerpiece. No matter how brutal its content was at points, it never overpowered those that were implicated.
From 2:37 to Vox Lux, other filmmakers have echoed this kind of stoicism. Now comes Hotel Mumbai, a 125-minute recreation of the Mumbai terrorists attacks that left hundreds dead on November 26, 2008. Over ten years seems like enough time, right? But what Anthony Maras’ debut feature doesn’t understand is that time isn’t the most powerful proximity. It’s how a filmmaker frames their characters—what their centerpiece truly is.
Hotel Mumbai’s centerpiece is its violence. Maras and co-writer John Collee (Happy Feet) give audiences a quick crash course of those about to be involved, such as hotel kitchen worker Arjun (Dev Patel) and boss Oberoi (Anupam Kher). They happen to be serving a handful of guests, the most consistently shown of whom are married tourists David and Zahra (Armie Hammer and Nazanin Boniadi), and while those two enjoy their time together, their nanny Sally (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) takes care of their infant son. The film cuts between them with an immediacy similar to Elephant. It doesn’t try to contextualize them. That’s fine, but it doesn’t give them much humanity nor does it give them any room to breathe. It dives right into the brutality without enough depth, making for an uneasy balance of real-life tragedy and titillating action fare.
The film even opens with the 10 terrorists as they enter the city. They’re the focus at the beginning; they’re more or less the focus at the end. They’re stereotypical Arab terrorists whose wrongdoings are completed divorced from any developed sociopolitical issues. Maras and Collee’s script stops at their motives being “Islam is good; everything is else bad.” It’s frustrating, too, to see this two-hour film rarely exist on the same plane as the issues it depicts. Even when Maras’ filmmaking makes the movie feel realistic, it doesn’t have more gravity than a throwaway action movie.
Some might say that the movie is bold in how it depicts its violence and this is true for the first 30 minutes or so. The commotion is as cold as it is lurid. Maras uses very little music and very few tricks, making the chaos truly unavoidable. That said, it never goes past shocking the audience, which is made retroactively troublesome by the film’s slow shift in tone. The first 30 minutes of Hotel Mumbai might be effective at points, but it doesn’t gel with what follows.
When the fire starts growing and the dust starts piling up, Maras’ filmmaking makes a hard left turn into the like of emotional sanitization seen in Peter Berg’s more recent films, presenting complex traumas only to wrap them up in a neat bow. Gone are the silent stretches are in come scenes entirely reliant on music to build tension. While he and cinematographer Nick Remy Matthews begin the film with careful—if pallid—takes, their climactic are more concerned with brutal carnage than spatial awareness. Is it a tense movie? Yes, it is at times. But a lot of that comes from the filmmakers’ exploitation of audience empathy.
It proves to be as thematically repetitive as it is competently made. Characters sometimes feel only as recognizable as their respective actors who, despite doing fine work, don’t get much to work with. The violence reigns supreme with the tenacity of a slightly more graphic action movie. Is that the point? If so, Hotel Mumbai glides feels a little too close to exploitation at points. If not, it’s an awkward mishmash of easily digestible excitement and stark matter-of-factness. The intent is muddled either way.
About the Author: Matt Cipolla
Writer and film critic for hire who has worked with Kino Lorber Studio Classics, WGN Radio, Bright Wall/Dark Room, RogerEbert.com, The Spool, and more. Firmly believes that ".gif" is pronounced "jiff." 
