‘Angry Young Men’ review: A soft-hearted tribute and a missed opportunity

The Beatles were only around for eight years. John Lennon and Paul McCartney started out writing songs ‘eyeball to eyeball’ and ended up ‘chasing paper, getting nowhere’. Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar began working together the year after the Beatles broke up. They were a screenwriting team from 1971 to 1982. Those 11 years were enough to change Hindi cinema, even if by the end they were as estranged as Lennon and McCartney. The brevity of their partnership makes the enormity of their achievement almost unbelievable. It’s one thing to write Sholay, Deewaar, Trishul, Don and Kala Patthar. It’s another to write them all in four years. 

In the decades since their split, Salim-Javed’s standing has become almost god-like, tied as it is to the legend of Amitabh Bachchan, and to Sholay and Deewaar’s unshaken reputation as two of the greatest Indian films. Angry Young Men, a new three-part Amazon Prime documentary series on the duo directed by Namrata Rao, heaps on more praise, but does little to illuminate their working methods or reckon with their legacy. Despite all the interviews they gave and books written on their films, there was still a lot we didn’t know about Salim-Javed. After 135 minutes, we still don’t.  

Angry Young Men charges out of the gate breathless. In the six minutes following the opening credits, we hear from Salman Khan, Farhan Akhtar, Mahesh Bhatt, Dharmendra, Jaya Bachchan, Zoya Akhtar, Taran Adarsh, Bhawana Somaaya, Shatrughan Sinha, Aamir Khan, Hrithik Roshan, Rajkumar Hirani, Anupama Chopra, Yash, Ranveer Singh, Farhan Akhtar, Honey Irani, Ramesh Talwar, Rahul Rawail, Prem Chopra and Karan Johar. Overlaid with a generic masala score, it’s a bland baton pass between a bunch of famous people: a warning of what’s to come. 

The Yash Raj docu-series last year made clear just how self-congratulatory and unilluminating upper-echelon Bollywood can be while assessing itself. Angry Young Men is a little better, but suffers from the same fundamental flaws. The show is a joint production by three studios—Tiger Baby, Excel Studios, Salman Khan Films—run by Khan and Akhtar’s children. Film documentaries overseen by the family of the subject are not uncommon. For obvious reasons—a lack of critical distance, painful lines of questioning cut off—they’re also rarely distinguished. 

Then there's the talking heads. With such a large cast of interviewees, Rao should, at least in theory, have had the freedom to use the more articulate ones and ditch the incoherent. Yet, many of the bytes—and they really are bytes—are unremarkable statements delivered with genuine excitement (Hrithik Roshan: “That writing—it is so powerful”; Abhijat Joshi: “I think it’s the genius of the films that changed the game.”). Sometimes it’s a lack of articulation; trying to explain the upheaval of the '70s, Reema Kagti can do no better than “socially there was a lot of stuff going on”. Sometimes it’s the wrong person being asked an important question—what’s the point of Abhishek Bachchan recalling his father telling him about Salim-Javed’s script readings, especially when Amitabh is also interviewed?

Angry Young Men has surprisingly little insight to offer into Salim-Javed's working methods. Did they write in one space, or apart? Did they divide responsibilities? (It isn't until episode 3 that Akhtar mentions that story was usually his partner's forte, and dialogue his.) It would have been illuminating to know if they had screenwriting heroes, Indian or otherwise. The only clue we get is Khan with a stack of bound scripts... Rebecca, Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath. The series flattens the adaptability of Salim-Javed to the various genres and directors they negotiated. There has to have been a difference working with Yash Chopra on a bleak film about miners, reworking Hollywood and spaghetti westerns with Ramesh Sippy, and creating the slick, seamy world of Don with Chandra Barot. How is there not one memorable story of what it was like to be in the room when Salim-Javed were narrating a script?

Salim-Javed's insistence on being recognised for their work was unprecedented in Hindi cinema. They had their names graffitied onto the poster of Zanjeer, and on Dostana insisted they be paid one lakh more than what Bachchan was earning. But after they separated, the profession stayed where it was. Their success was framed as something glorious and unrepeatable; they were ‘superstars’, the rest were writers. This attitude is evident in the comments of Aamir Khan ("If you say writers should be paid the most, they also need to be the biggest stars on the team") and Hrithik Roshan ("Writing has to become aspirational…after (Salim-Javed), we don’t have superstar writers"). You can sense Rao’s feelings about this sort of hedging; she juxtaposes them with interviews of working screenwriters, who talk about the same insecurity and lack of respect that Salim-Javed rebelled against. 

Rao is a terrific editor who’s worked on films like Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, Ishqiya and Kahaani. There are moments in Angry Young Men when you feel the stirrings of a looser, more inclusive portrait: the cutaways to everyday fans and faces and settings; the stunning shot of a local train snaking through the city at night; the old man pointing excitedly to the flat in his dilapidated building where Salim Khan once used to stay. Akhtar and Khan are interviewed separately, but Rao unites them in her edit, cutting from one to the other when they’re having a cup of tea or pulling out a prized book.  

The fall is mourned but only lightly examined. Akhtar uses a lovely phrase (he’s used it before) in describing their first flop, Immaan Dharam: a roti made of salt, with only a sprinkling of flour. Angry Young Men is itself a namak ki roti, too many stars, too much flavouring. The third episode—in which the duo's sundering is allotted as much screentime as their respective marital splits—is all tasteful teariness; all that's left is for Simi Garewal to turn up. As divorce series go, I was much more impressed by Break Point, in which tennis players Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi relitigated their partnership.   

There’s an awkward reunion, but a more honest ending might have been the scene before, Salim sitting quietly in his home, Javed in his. “The light has softened,” Akhtar murmurs. Perhaps feelings have softened as well. Can they now think back on those 11 years without bitterness? As McCartney reminded Lennon when it became clear they would no longer be together: ‘You and I have memories, longer than the road that stretches out ahead.’