'G.D.N.' Movie Review: Madhavan Stumbles In This Lightweight Drama of A Heavyweight Figure

When storytellers say they have made a film to inspire people — red flag! Abort! For the kind of people who make movies to inspire others are, perhaps, those least capable of evoking inspiration — or worse, they feel like they are catering to a baseline stupidity. People aren’t inspired by formulas, or at least people with half a mind aren’t. At best, it can make them simper in theater halls, whacked over their heads with a background score that can even turn a dead man into a pound of goose flesh. But when you return to the thick materiality of your life, you forget that goosefleshing. To truly inspire people, you have to recognise that nothing moves mountains like honesty, like humanity. The best biopics — a genre we are facing a glut in, including Madhavan’s limp Rocketry: The Nambi Effect (2022) — know that ideas can never do the heavy lifting of a life well lived. At best, it can serve as a placeholder. 

GDN, an exhausting paperwork drama, has set out to inspire young people. It starts off with a debate, in 1984, on whether to include his name, Gopalswamy Doraiswamy Naidu, in the syllabus or not. Most people disagree. A dissenting teacher walks into the meeting late with bound copies of his biography, as one does. She says history is written by the victor, but what of the other side? GDN is framed as history’s loser, deserving a reckoning. A thick copy for each of the debating members is slammed on the table. They read. They are inspired. They include Naidu in the syllabus. 

Today, as textbooks are being re-written to muddy the distinction between myth and history, to argue for the inclusion of another myth — and what we are going to see is, indeed, a mythologised history — is its own stupidity. Letting that slide, the framework shoves us around tumbled years, reducing GDN’s life to a laundry list of his many, many accomplishments. At first we are in 1914, and a young GDN collects money to buy a motorcycle from a British man. He is entranced by the new contraption. But then, on his way to buy the motorcycle, seeing a group of protesting people, he empties his pockets so they can keep the pressure, and not yield.

Out of money, Naidu moves to Coimbatore to work in a restaurant for three years to save enough money and come back to the village to buy the motorcycle. What is this obsession? It is not to ride as much as to dismantle it and learn how it can be made at scale. An industrialist, an enterprising soul, he turns every inconvenience into a potential invention. Naidu wants to make people’s lives easier. He hates seeing his first wife Chellamma (Priyamani) cry cutting onions, so he smarts a device that can do the cutting for her. He makes a juicer. And for the men — industrial equipment. He also builds a polytechnic university, with two-year courses because four is a waste of time — as are the arts. A character says, “Quite simply, he is a genius”, and you yearn for the film to correct that. That there is nothing simple about genius. Alas. The film relies on his simplicity to tell his story.

Chellamma tells Naidu to leave her and marry someone who can be excited by his science and stand by him, because he is built for great things and needs a partner who won’t hold him back. Strange reasoning, stranger formulation. He is hesitant, but the beauty of his new wife, Ranganayaki (Dushara Vijayan) leaves him smitten. The first wife — and the daughter he has from that marriage — are soon forgotten. They don’t show up again. Did he ever love Chellamma? His daughter? 

The film refuses to engage with these questions — is he a good father? A good husband? A good friend? The film prefers to, instead, answer these questions — is he a good boss? Is he a good citizen? Is he a good scientist? It is such a male genre of storytelling. It is casually mentioned that he has gambled away his wealth, but Madhavan plays this scene with knowing charm, and Ranganayaki is pouty, thinking the reversal of fortune is her doing. The question completely gets ignored — what gambling? 

Naidu builds a fleet of premium, punctual buses that he offers at cheap prices. The business soars. He convinces the local bus people to band together, and form United Motor Service. Here, he meets Ramaiah Pillai (Sathyaraj), who can tell the health of a bus from the sound it makes over a speed-break. Impressed, he makes him his second-in-command, his phantom limb, and maybe, perhaps, friend — though I am not sure of this. 

Out of jealousy, first the British, then, the independent Indian government make life hell for him, trying to get him to pay a fine that isn’t his to pay in the first place. Ambalapara Krishnan (Jayaram), a Brahmin, by-the-book accountant is brought in to terrorise Naidu with paperwork. Naidu is unmoved. Krishnan, humiliated. The British, humiliated. A North Indian competitor, humiliated. Conspiracies run afoot to yank Naidu. Naidu tries to bring Mercedes-Benz to Coimbatore. Thwarted! 

A paperwork drama, the remaining film is a table-tennis scheming and counter scheming over payment and non-payment of fines. A dog is ushered in. As are phosphorus bombs. Hitler makes a special appearance. These scenes border on the parody, with Madhavan’s body VFX-ed into a German crowd — real historic footage — hailing Hitler as he motors past with his entourage. You would be hard pressed to believe any of this happened even if you were lean of rational spirit. The form of film is important. How you tell a story is just as, if not more important than what you are telling. Cinema is a medium. It is not a message. 

Besides, a paperwork drama demands one thing — a singular fidelity to the paperwork, to make its demands seem urgent, its logic cogent, compelling, and foolproof, and its arbitrators, hawk-eyed. Instead, the paperwork is framed as useless, its arbitrators, either scheming or bookish. 

Madhavan is adequate, really, in the sense that he occupies the silly tone of the film without playing it silly — even as the film completely goes off the rails in the last half hour, with Madhavan appearing in a printed sari. He doesn’t go for broke acting out a character who does precisely that. There is a restraint he brings to these moments — and at some point, this restraint doesn’t feel like a moderation but an apology for the film’s tone, as though Madhavan is trying to steer the film in a more respectable direction. 

Desperate to make GDN seem important, instead of digging into the texture of his life, it populates the film with cameos of known personalities, hoping their presence near him and praise of him will serve as evidence of his importance — Periyar, CV Raman, among others. In the end credits, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Golwalkar make an appearance. After a point, it gets irritating, as though the film is whispering at you — see, all the important, worthy people who met Naidu. I wish the film had the patience to, instead, flesh out Naidu as an important, worthy figure, too. Years pass by in a slate. Dialogues dole out his achievements. A map is shown to describe his two year journey back from war-torn Germany. A 10 second montage is used to describe a three year travail. It is such flashy filmmaking without the foundation of character — it assumes we will fall in line. Will we? 

For a send-nudes generation, it wants to preach send-Naidus, and it makes a case towards the end of Indic civilisation greatness, how the “invaders” —it means British, but because it doesn’t say them by name, it could also mean the Mughals — divided us on the basis of religion, language, and caste. This is one of those ahistorical films that thinks the British invented caste — and prior to that, we were living in some golden age. And it wants to be part of history textbooks? The irony writes itself.

This is the problem with the pedestal. You put people on it, venerate them, but soon they are forgotten because who looks up these days? By turning a colourful life lived on the ire of multiple governments into a flat, tiresome portrait, Krishnakumar Ramakumar has thrust Gopalswamy Doraiswamy Naidu into a second oblivion.