
Newton movie review: Rajkummar Rao in Newton (Image courtesy: RajkummarRao)
Cast: Rajkummar Rao, Pankaj Tripathi, Anjali Patil, Raghubir Yadav
Director: Amit V Masurkar
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
I would love to see Pankaj Tripathi as a sleuth. Not only is the actor incapable of hitting a false note, but there is a beautiful inscrutability to his actions and to his eyes. We don't know if he's about to stifle a yawn or bark lethal orders, and this feeling that even the actor himself is deciding in the moment what exactly to do next, as if he is making up the words he's saying, marks Tripathi out as an extremely compelling performer. It's hard to look away, and, as I said, I'd love to see him in a role that fetishises his seemingly unpredictable thinking process.
In Amit Masurkar's Newton, Tripathi plays Aatma Singh, an army officer who has looked over many an election in many a war-torn part of the country. He is currently posted in the forests of Chhatisgarh, in a Naxal-controlled area with more landmines than there are voters. One morning before he can start on his breakfast eggs, he meets a presiding election officer called Newton who wants - exasperatingly enough - to do everything by the book. The film is, for the most part, about the day they spend together.
This is a film about how impossible it is to follow the rules.

Movie review: Rajkummar Rao in Newton
Newton Kumar, played by the assiduously chameleonic Rajkummar Rao, is a stickler for the written word. He might have changed his first name - he was originally named Nutan, like the Bandini actress - but he likes to play by the rules, so much so that as a youngster playing cricket he'd find himself in the role of umpire. He is close to being irritatingly earnest, and through the course of this film, every character, even those who like him, lose their patience with him.
Visually the film looks markedly plain, though cinematographer Swapnil Sonawane keeps attempting to compose odd tilt-shift frames where Newton is the only character in focus. These shots are ill-advised and yank us out of the spartan realism the film is going for, as does the solitary song sequence that feels unnecessarily cinematic. Masurkar can be too literal with visualisation - a voiceover informs that officials played cards and clipped their nails while we see them doing just that, and there are some clumsy analogies about the number 5 and the number 6 - but he has a fine comic voice, and some of the film's finest and most overlooked bits are when he's cutting away from Newton and the gang to show canvassing election candidates and their follies.

Rajkummar Rao in Newton
The film begins, in fact, with a politician standing next to a cutout barely larger than himself, like a flattened twin, exhorting the masses not to vote for him - before going on to say that he wants the populace to have a laptop in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. Caveat emptor, India.

Rajkummar Rao in Newton
Rao and Tripathi provide terrific performances, especially when pouncing on one another - even literally. They are well complemented by Raghubir Yadav in an entertainingly loquacious role, Anjali Patil as a smartly dignified Adivasi woman and, quite memorably, Mukesh Prajapati as an election officer who doesn't have much to say but is easily, enviably content. The reason he chose this high-security posting was because he wanted to ride in a helicopter, and while the film is all about witnessing the dog of democracy being wagged, this is one character who gets what he wants. Fresh free-range eggs, a meal of country chicken, a chopper ride. He is, therefore, the least likely to go anywhere. All beware the well fed.