Midnight's Children - review

Some authors blithely sign away movie rights to their books, happy to abandon responsibility for the finished flick. Others, unable to take the bull by the horns, fret from the sidelines of the shoot. Salman Rushdie, on the other hand, spent two years distilling his 1980 Booker winner into a screenplay, for which he himself delivers the extensive voiceover; he also executive produces. So Midnight's Children was never likely to have been a travesty of his novel, about two boys, one rich, one poor, swapped soon after the moment of their births, at the very moment English rule in India ended in 1947. What that does make it, however, is the world's least essential adaptation. It sheds no fresh light on the material, turns and turns but with no new spin, fails to pepper the source. This is self-defeating faithfulness, which genuflects so far as to insist the audience can't be released for some 148 minutes, and employs actors perfectly cast to the point of blandness. That Charles Dance would show up as a cream-suited, scotch-swigging, servant-shagging aristo feels less fortuitous than just plain fated. Director Deepa Mehta slathers proceedings in a haze of period whimsy - sometimes engaging, sometimes less so. Violence, political uprising and even basic poverty gleam with rude health; this is history fed the comfort food, tea-time serial treatment. The magical realism scenes in which our hero wiggles his nose and conjures up all the sprogs who popped out as the clock chimed midnight, have the soft-focus feel of a youth improv group encouraged to roleplay around the morning headlines. Wooden flutes, xylophones and wind chimes patter about on the soundtrack. Rumours that Rushdie also wrote the theme tune remain unsubstantiated.