Inspired by the documentary, Surviving Mumbai, first time feature film director Anthony Maras made the docudrama Hotel Mumbai starring Dev Patel (Lion) as an Indian hotel waiter, Armie Hammer (Call Me By Your Name) as an American husband and father and Jason Isaacs (The Death of Stalin) as a Russian.
The movie, opening this weekend, recreates an Islamic terrorist attack on the city formerly known as Bombay. The November 26, 2008, act of war is one of those timed, coordinated assaults like the jihadists’ failed Bojinka plot or the attack on America on September 11, 2001.
Maras, who graciously appeared with Isaacs at an afterwards Q & A at the ArcLight Hollywood where I saw the movie, means well. He’s apparently a lawyer by profession and he brings a certain eye for detail to the story. But Hotel Mumbai is too journalistic, which results in a film which unintentionally glorifies the jihadists. By focusing on the hotel guests’ diversity or multicultural backgrounds, downplaying any acts of heroism, which were often unsuccessful and rendered impossible by incompetence by India’s government, Maras ends up with a movie about another act of war against the West which goes unaccounted for and unavenged.
To be clear, the attack was a victory for the barbaric Islamic fundamentalists. The state sponsors, even the planners, were never exactly identified, let alone caught or destroyed. On the upside of this extremely naturalistic approach, Maras depicts with accuracy the Islamic terrorists’ devoutly religious rituals, including their incessantly mindless repeating of the phrase “God is great!” For this brave depiction alone, Maras deserves a serious credit for showing the truth of what happened during this monstrous act of evil. It was a massacre born of faith and religion. Hotel Mumbai makes this clear.
But the movie mixes in other aspects that dramatize the jihadists’ victory that, on balance, amount to a morally gray, neutral motion picture. By refusing to delve into the impetus, motives and fundamentalism of the mass murderers’ faith in Islam and, instead, showing them to be relatively innocent boys, Hotel Mumbai implies a moral equivalency. Indeed, one of the most tense scenes involves an act of mercy on behalf of the Moslem terrorists. Unfortunately, this makes Hotel Mumbai both confusing and morally agnostic about its subject. The grand hotel and its noble and heroic staff, which regard the individual “guest as God”, are lost in the mayhem.
Hotel Mumbai is more like a graphic recreation refusing to take sides than a proper cinematic portrayal of an act of war by savages against civilization.