This drama starts promisingly enough, with a zippy, self-aggrandising voiceover introducing our protagonist Arjun (Abhishek Bachchan). He’s a Don Draper sort: works in advertising, at the top of his game, fond of walking along while throwing out pearls of wisdom and instructions to his team. “I want at least 17 seconds on the cheese pull,” he insists to a minion working on a pizza commercial. As in Mad Men, his homelife isn’t quite as assured, though he feels he’s doing a bang-up job, speaking proudly of being a weekend dad who shows up for his daughter when it matters. It’s clear, however, that pride goeth before a fall.
The fall in question here is a sudden cancer diagnosis, out of nowhere. Arjun is given 100 or so days to live. Being the kind of tenacious guy who refuses to see himself as a statistic, he determines that he will fight. Here the film begins to play into a narrative controversial in cancer-support circles: some find the idea of cancer as something that can be battled empowered. Others find it insulting, suggesting that if someone dies of cancer there is some element of not having fought hard enough, of having been a quitter in some way, rather than subject to an incurable and often deadly disease. Arjun is certainly of the view that he has been enlisted into a war that can be won through sheer force of willpower, and embarks on a series of surgeries.
The film hits a number of standard weepy movie tropes, including his physical transformation and the ebb and flow of various relationships. Arjun grapples with a version of suicidal ideation: at one point he plans to drive off a cliff edge, “like Thelma and Louise”.
The problem with all of this is that the film spends about as long establishing Arjun’s pre-diagnosis life and personality as his pizza advert did focusing on the cheese pull. Mad Men sent Don Draper into free-fall after many seasons, and that was what made his disintegration so compelling. A film doesn’t have quite that luxury in terms of runtime, but a bit more setup would have paid dividends in terms of the subsequent journey. The fact that it’s based on a true story doesn’t help much, either, unless perhaps you knew the real-life guy.
• I Want to Talk is in cinemas from 22 November.
