Jinnah

Christopher Lee spent the second half of his career working for respectability beyond horror stardom, and for his effort was ultimately rescued by George Lucas and Peter Jackson. Not long before those comeback movies, he took a lead role in a potential epic, Pakistan’s answer to Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. That 3-hour Oscar winner has a big section on the 1947 formation of a new country. If I’m reading correctly, it portrays Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the resolute Muslim separatist known as Quaid-e-Azam, in a vaguely villainous light.

The historical biography Jinnah is a smaller-scale epic that nevertheless never looks cramped or claustrophobic. Regionally produced, written and directed by Jamil Dehlavi, it was plagued by infighting from the start. Although the director was blamed in the press during production, the consensus now is that the executive producer Akbar Ahmed conspired against him, stealing credit, re-routing production money and blaming Dehlavi in the press. Jamil Dehlavi pulled Jinnah through various delays and scandals, but with the funding in disarray, it was denied a reasonable release.

The contributors to PI-Indicator’s disc contradict the stories published during production, when a major Pakistani news organization spread disinformation that confused the record. Although one of his autobiographies criticizes the director, Christopher Lee said that it contained his best performance, eclipsing his work in The Wicker Man.

It’s easy to see why Chris Lee would like Jinnah so much — he’s the star of an impressive production and plays in more than half of its scenes. The stern Muslim diplomat-activist is ideal casting for Lee, who excelled as authority figures with commanding stares. Lee is a positive presence even when the script is critical of Jinnah’s actions. Jinnah is yet another fast-paced parade of expository scenes attempting to relate complicated events with out dumbing them down too much. Lee is front and center through much of the picture, giving a very good account of himself.

Garbo may Talk, and even Laugh: But Chris Lee CRIES!

In other words, this is the kind of movie Christopher Lee probably wished he was making far, far earlier in his career. Even in Billy Wilder’s prestigious The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, the actor most often played one-note characters without a sense of humor, or much screen time. This role gives him much more to work with. Chris Lee wasn’t normally associated with sincere humanism. The tears Jinnah sheds are genuinely moving.

Jamil Dehlavi’s screenplay takes a risky creative step for an historical biography. The show begins with Mohammed Ali Jinnah (Christopher Lee) in a medical emergency, and then shows him being received in an afterlife that resembles a 19th-century library. A St. Peter-like librarian curiously billed as ‘The Narrator’ (Shashi Kapoor) can’t review Jinnah’s life because his new computer system isn’t functioning, so the two of them wander through episodes from the past, in the guided-tour way we know from film-blancs like Here Comes Mr. Jordan or It’s a Wonderful Life.

Initially this seems a terrible idea, yet it works quite well, thanks to actor Kapoor (The Deceivers), whose ‘narrator’ plays well off Lee’s somewhat inflexible Jinnah. Lee’s deceased diplomat looks back at his life with varying degrees of sadness and satisfaction, and the warm Kapoor provides a hint of sentimentality.

These ‘afterlife observers’ are present throughout yet don’t interfere with the story — the theatrical device of the offstage viewpoint in fact helps keep the conventional narrative from bogging down.

In 1916, the wealthy Muslim attorney Mohammed Ali Jinnah (played as a young man by Richard Lintern of The Bank Job and The Crown) is already part of a Hindu-majority congress advocating independence from England. He falls in love with the beautiful but underaged Ruttie (Indira Varma), a Parsee whose father forbids their relationship. Two years later she turns 18, re-meets Jinnah and marries him. They have a daughter, but as Jinnah’s role in the indendence movement grows, Ruttie feels socially abandoned. Ruttie dies of cancer, leaving Jinnah regretting that he didn’t show enough of the love he felt for her.

Jinnah’s spinster sister Fatima (Shireen Shah) becomes his closest ally in post-WW2 politics. The wise Fatima aids and advises him in diplomatic matters. Especially helpful is her sincere friendship with Edwina Mountbatten (Maria Aitken of A Fish Called Wanda), the equally politically-involved wife of Lord Mountbatten (James Fox), the English Viceroy of India. Mountbatten is accepting of Edwina’s loving relationship with Jawaharlal Nehru (Robert Ashby), another figure in the Indian nationalist movement.

Most of the storyline is indeed a ‘Cliff’s Notes’ skate across major political events, especially when Mountbatten is given the go-ahead to organize a peaceful transfer of power to the Indian nationalists. The big problem with the Partition of India is the country’s Hindu-Muslim split. By now Jinnah has left the Hindu-majority congress. Knowing that the religious divide will become violent when the British Raj departs, Jinnah is convinced that the northernmost Muslim-majority provinces should break away. Having already split with Gandhi (Sam Dastor), Jinnah must preside over a rough start. Hopes for peace are dashed by the duplicitous Mountbatten, who betrays the partition agreement in the hope that the new Pakistan will fail. An awful refugee crisis as minority populations try to flee to safety, leads to massacres that claim millions of lives.

Jinnah recounts this big slice of history rather well, even if most every word in Dehlavi’s script must serve an expository purpose. Famous personages explain their social relationships, religious differences and politcial strategies. The low point in the dialogue comes when Edwina Mountbatten’s discussion of baking cakes somehow segues into her husband’s effort to get Jinnah under control. But the characterizations are always interesting, especially Fatima & Edwina’s earnest efforts to help ordinary Indian citizens caught up in an awful social upheaval nobody can avoid.

Jinnah is an interesting character as well. He wants an independent nation because he believes the faiths are incompatible: a united India would put Muslims at the mercy of the intolerant Hindu majority. Jinnah is suspicious and formal, and rigidly ethical. He refuses to do anything as underhanded as using the Edwina-Nehru affair to discredit his political opposition. Yet he feels he must formally disown his daughter Dina when she chooses to marry a Parsee.

This show presents Mahatma Gandhi not as the Wisest Man in History, but as an extremely effective and cagey politician, who tries to neutralize Jinnah by offering him a high post in a proposed united India. Jinnah criticizes Mahatma Gandhi for exacerbating the religious divide, and leveraging spiritualism to create a cult around himself. To Jinnah, Gandhi dresses like a peasant as a theatrical gambit to sway the masses. Both men knew well that Muslims and Hindus would likely not peacefully coexist. Jinnah’s strongest scene is when he lectures a Muslim extremist who tries to assassinate him:

“You are an ignorant fool. I have fought for your mother, your sister, and your children’s children to live in dignity. Islam doesn’t need fanatics like you, Islam needs men of vision who will build the country. Now grow up, and serve Pakistan!”

Is this wishful thinking?  To what degree is this movie a whitewash of the Father of Pakistan?  Was he really as anti-fundamentalist as presented here?  Did later U.S. & British (and Soviet) support of despots in the Middle East suppress other potential great democratic leaders?

The movie has convincing crowd scenes and a few representations of violent police actions and religious slaughter. The only embarrassingly overdone moment shows a defenseless Muslim woman killed by a lancer, and her husband and daughter crying over her. The direction elsewhere is exemplary, for character interaction, expressions of the period and scenes with many extras. It advocates a specific read of history, but so does the more ponderously ‘meaningful’ Gandhi, a fine epic that nevertheless seemed designed to attract Oscar nominations.

We’re surprised at how well the theatrical device of inserting the dead Jinnah into scenes works, with the humanist ‘narrator’ in tow. At one point the deceased ‘phantom’ Jinnah even stops in a garden to talk to his younger self. Near the finale comes an even odder theatrical invention, an other-dimensional trial in which Jinnah defends his actions and accuses Lord Mountbatten of an underhanded betrayal. The afterlife construction acknowledges that history is being re-examined. If the show is to have any relevance beyond the superficial, some important partisan point must be made somewhere. Jinnah comes down on the side of anti-Colonial independence.

In the accounts offered by Indicator’s essayist and the disc’s accompanying full making-of documentary, Jinnah was cursed by an unscrupulous executive producer, who crippled the production with attempts to squeeze out producer-director-writer Dehlavi, scuttling its chances to win a major release. The Pakistani media opposition slammed the choice of Englishman Christopher Lee to play Jinnah, even though the movie was always an English-language effort courting an international audience. A newspaper printed a picture of Chris Lee with fangs, depicting Dehlavi as a traitor for casting Dracula to play such an important national role.