Sanju doesn’t shy away from its protagonist’s bad choices. Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi chose to look at the Mahatma through a reverential lens, while Feroz Abbas Khan’s Gandhi, My Father cut Bapu down to size as someone so obsessed with his role of father of the nation that he forgot to be a father to his son. (Or writers in this case, Hirani and his regular partner-in-crime, Abhijat Joshi.) That’s why the same life can come in many versions. It’s usually not the audience’s business what the writer puts into a biopic, and what he leaves out. Was Sanju an emotional fool? Was he weak of will? Or was he someone who was programmed to flirt with fire? What makes this poor little rich boy so special, so different that we empathise with his lapses into behaviours we’d not so easily overlook in others? They didn’t buy arms from the underworld. So many Mumbai-ites received threats after the 1993 bomb blasts. So many boys have domineering fathers and mothers who die early.
The hope, therefore, was that the film would provide the why-s behind Sanjay Dutt’s actions. The difference is that Hirani’s other outsiders were forced into the situations they found themselves in (say, due to being left behind on earth), whereas everything Sanju did, he chose to do. He doesn’t fit his father’s expectations, his girlfriend’s dreams, and he doesn’t live up to his best friend’s friendship and his countrymen’s expectations of a patriotic citizen. I wondered how Hirani would handle the story of a cosseted industry insider - but it turns out the Sanju of Sanju is an outsider, too, a square peg in a round hole. If Munna Bhai was an outsider to the establishment, one of the 3 idiots was an outsider to the rote-learning rat race, and then we got a film about the ultimate outsider: an alien. When Rajkumar Hirani announced Sanju, it sounded like a breakaway.
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