‘Despatch’ Movie Review: Manoj Bajpayee Powers An Ugly And Effective Newsroom Drama

Director: Kanu Behl
Writers: Kanu Behl, Ishani Banerjee
Cast: Manoj Bajpayee, Shahana Goswami, Arrchita Agarwaal, Veena Mehta, Rii Sen
Streaming on: ZEE5 from December 13

Despatch starts off as a journalist story. It’s 2012. Joy Bag (Manoj Bajpayee) is a veteran crime reporter for a Mumbai-based newspaper. Joy is in a joyless marriage with Shweta (Shahana Goswami), and he plans a future with Prerna (Arrchita Agarwaal), a colleague he’s been having an affair with; he is in search of his next big headline.

The journalist story slowly morphs into a journalism story. It’s 2012. A leading daily is on the brink of the digital news era. Desperate to keep the print flame burning, its veteran crime reporter chases a dangerous scoop. Despite multiple warnings and personal setbacks, he keeps going. Despatch then exposes and reveals itself at once: Joy Bag emerges as a fictional surrogate for J. Dey, the Mid-Day investigations editor who was murdered in broad daylight in 2011. Kanu Behl’s 150-minute drama almost unfolds as a prequel to Scoop, Hansal Mehta’s Netflix series that dramatises the life of Jigna Vora, the ‘rival’ journalist and prime suspect in the killing of J. Dey. It’s the sort of grueling double bill that captures the dying moments of press freedom in a country entering a post-truth age.

The thing about Despatch is that at no point does it “look” like a slain-journalist movie. Everything about it is designed to humanise a sweaty character — and a vocation — that is too often deified by cinema. It’s a tribute that tries to dismantle the reverence of a tribute. Joy Bag eschews all the tropes of posthumous heroism: that air of inevitability, nobility, bleeding-heart passion, a person parading as a statement. He’s painfully ordinary, flawed, messy, even predatory. He has long abused the power imbalance in his profession; he has a pattern of dating younger proteges, exploiting their respect and making them ghost-write his books. He’s weaponised his wife’s reluctance to accommodate his mother and brother; he has no qualms treating her badly and playing the morally upright victim, but you can sense that he can’t handle a partner who is financially and intellectually superior.

Joy is also defined by a familiar brand of masculinity: a pussycat in the streets and a tiger in the sheets. He’s meek and reserved in public; the risky and rough sex he has are ego-venting sessions. Scenes that’d usually be slick and valiant in most movies are clumsy here: an ‘undercover’ mission in a Delhi factory, a dockyard shootout in Mumbai, his unruly scramble for information, his escape attempts from sharpshooters. Even Joy’s slow-burning pursuit of a multi-billion dollar scam is driven less by his lust for journalism. His courage stems from an innate desire to prove that he’s not as emasculated as he feels. When Prerna accuses him of not defending her against a rude landlord and questions his manliness, he dives deeper into the investigation that threatens to consume him. When he has yet another spat with Shweta in front of her friends, his reaction is to storm off and accompany the cops to a violent face-off; the result is a comically real chase and a broken nose. A domestic dispute (where his wife mounts him and takes away his control) is followed by his assault of a source in prison; he simply attacks a person who cannot fight back.

Basically, Joy isn’t chasing the truth so much as a toxic sense of self-worth. There’s an “I’ll show you” vibe about every decision he makes and every lead he explores. And it’s not some gritty journey of fourth-estate mettle. It’s not that Joy is focused, smart or determined till the end. He proceeds like a man trying to be a stud who is unafraid of consequences, but the gravity of his situation only suddenly hits him; the shock of being on a hitlist snaps him out of his masculinity trance, but it’s too late by the time he backtracks. Not many protagonists are depicted as uncertain and reactionary, not least reporters, so it’s strangely refreshing to see Joy become a victim of his own false bravado.

Despatch is not without its shortcomings. The story that Joy chases is not the point, but the specifics are constantly blurry: a shady realty company, a money-laundering T20 league, the underworld-industrialist nexus, shell companies, shadowy builders and lawyers. For a narrative so long, the vagueness can be disorienting. Even if the idea is to expand on the isolation of Joy and his shapeless quest to nowhere, it can’t be limited to multiple players telling him “you have no idea what you’re getting into”. Despatch also has a male-gaze problem. I get that Joy is the embodiment of the gaze, but there’s something combative about how the camera captures the crudity of bodies in heat.

Its relentless effort to humanise Joy dehumanises the people around him; the excuse cannot always be that it’s channeling the man’s outlook or that real-world sex is ugly and objectifying. This is probably Behl’s most accessible movie yet, but the staging is gratuitous and deliberately provocative, as if to force-feed the cinema of raw expression. You can tell that the film-making thrives on making the actors feel uncomfortable under the guise of character development. At some level, the movie seems to dislike women more than its protagonist does — the long close-ups of their groveling and anxious faces search for meaning, fetishising the very oppression that Joy is supposed to represent.

Having said that, Manoj Bajpayee commits to a difficult role. A lot of the film counts on our response to watching him (literally) naked and primal and coiled up, but his real physicality — as is often the case — supplies the urgency and fragility of a cult-like figure. The actor is at his best in traditional “action” and breakthrough sequences, where he moves and speaks like someone struggling to maintain the facade of heroism. Joy Bag convinces himself that he’s fighting for relevance in a fast-changing landscape, but his body language is that of a man whose perseverance is a front for selfish instincts. There are times when the film makes Joy too unlikable, and Bajpayee is faced with the insurmountable task of defying the viewer’s empathy. Yet, all it takes is one shot of Joy tearing up on his bike, awkwardly running with his camera, panicking on a phone call or briskly explaining his bank accounts and paperwork to his confused family. The camera sometimes zooms in on him in public places, replicating the illusion of the world closing in on him — and watching him too closely.

It’s almost unfair that Bajpayee can plug the film’s holes without a word, but perhaps that’s the “pay-off” of an uncomfortable performance. It’s like watching a character crumble under the pressure of being a character. This allows Despatch to rise above its obvious vision and raise deeper questions about the ink-tainted relationship between morality and heroism. At some point, the film confronts a society that romanticises the image — the righteous immunity — of speaking truth to power. And it is rooted in the fact that, like most professions, some people do it to rescue themselves from who they are. They report on their compromised surroundings to feel better about themselves. After all, the room in ‘newsroom’ often alludes to a personal space, not a political reckoning.