‘Sitaare Zameen Par' review: More life lessons from Aamir Khan

What might Aamir Khan's last decade-and-a-half have been like had he not done 3 Idiots? I'd imagine his fans, and maybe the man himself, would look at the 2009 film as a positive turning point. It was, after all, a wild success, one that set Khan up for other, even more successful films in the same vein. He was already gravitating towards morally instructive projects; Taare Zameen Par (2007), his first as director, was about a gifted dyslexic child. But 3 Idiots showed how happy audiences were to be lectured at if you made yourself look silly and made them feel smart. Always tagged as a 'thinking actor', Khan now seemed determined to make audiences think, even if his films often did the thinking for them.
Sitaare Zameen Par might be the purest example yet of an Aamir Khan Life Lessons Film. There's barely a scene in its 158 minutes that doesn't lend itself to a teachable moment. Like in Dangal (2016), Khan assumes the role of uninformed grump who will eventually see the light. Every wrongheaded thing said by basketball coach Gulshan about people with learning disabilities is brought up later and turned into sagely advice. If you like being explained things like you're a seven-year-old, this is the film for you.
Freshly fired from his job for punching another coach, Gulshan is arrested for drunk driving. The judge hearing his case spares him a jail sentence in lieu of community service as the coach of a team of youngsters with various learning disabilities, from Down syndrome to invisible autism (the team-members are all played by differently abled actors). Gulshan is blithely insensitive to begin with, referring to his charges as 'mental' and 'abnormal'. This prompts the first of many, many lectures, with the school's owner, Kartar (the winsome Gurpal Singh), patiently explaining how everyone has their own level of normal.
Sitaare Zameen Par is a remake of the 2018 Spanish film Champions, which has already been adapted in Saudi Arabia, Germany and USA (as a Woody Harrelson film). Director R.S. Prasanna and writer Divy Nidhi Sharma don't just retain the broad beats of the original, they reuse specific jokes, actions, scenes verbatim, from a wayward throw that knocks down a tube light to a mouse rescue that helps overcome a fear of bathing. Some of the borrowings are done without a thought as to whether they'd work here. In the Spanish film, one of the players has a girlfriend who might be a sex worker. The gag fails miserably in Sitaare, both because the character is younger and because it feels like cheap bait to have the word 'prostitute' repeated for laughs in an Indian film (it's like a version of the 'balaatkar' gag in 3 Idiots).
Prasanna made the sparkling Shubh Mangal Saavdhan (and its Tamil original, Kalyana Samayal Saadham), but is entirely subsumed by Khan's desire to educate and edify. He may as well be a hired hand on an episode of Satyamev Jayate, the widely watched social reform documentary series that Khan hosted in the early 2010s. There's a base level of professionalism here, but I'd rather see a trainwreck than another brightly lit, boringly staged, generically scored Hindi film.
When Gulshan's not being lectured by Kartar or his mother (Dolly Ahluwalia), his wife (Genelia Deshmukh) shows up to criticise and improve him (they're separated because he doesn't want to have children). He slowly becomes more empathetic, guiding the team through a special needs national basketball tournament. On the bus back from Chandigarh, they're heckled by unsympathetic passengers: again, a scene lifted almost word for word from the original, but without rhythm or wit. That Khan, who had a deserved reputation for pushing original material, has now made two films in a row without an original bone in their body, is both depressing and indicative of where Hindi cinema is today. He is, of course, responsible for his own choices, but I also blame 3 Idiots. Most people are ruined by failure. Aamir Khan was ruined by success.

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