‘Vishwanath And Sons’ Review: Suriya’s Charisma and Playful Chemistry With Mamitha Baiju Keeps This Family Drama On Even Keel

There’s a life lesson thrown at you at the very start of “Vishwanath & Sons”: When something is broken or old, try and fix it rather than buy a new iteration of it. Do so only as a last resort. Sanjay Vishwanath (Suriya) carries that learning into his adult life. Ahead of his gold medal win at the 2024 Olympics in Paris, his locker is vandalised and broken into. His pistol is dismantled. Rather than cry about it or give up, he puts it back together and wins the competition anyway.

Papa shouldn’t have preached to Sanjay as a kid, though. Via flashbacks, you learn that he summarily abandons son and wife (winningly played by Kalayarasi Radikaa Sarathkumar) for a younger woman, an actress (played by Raveena Tandon). And then, the young boy calls him out on his double standards, only to be met with a “you’ll get it when you fall in love.”

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Cut to the present, Sanjay is 40, self-sufficient, lonely by choice and equal parts feared and respected. The only person he betrays emotions to and obeys, is his mother. The only thing he refuses her is her repeated requests to get married. By and by, he is egged on to meet a prospective match, but returns instead from a US trip with a baby son born via surrogacy.

All is well, until it’s discovered that the child has a rare disorder and requires a bone-marrow transplant from his birth mother. Sanjay tracks her down and finds out that she’s Tamil, like he is. Her name is Maddy Jay (played by Mamitha Baiju), she’s 22, a couple decades his junior and a student doctor. They strike a deal: she goes through with the transplant and they go their separate ways after that.

But things are never as cut and dry as that and Maddy falls for Sanjay’s good-natured charms, wins over his mother and refuses to go away quietly, when asked to. What’s on her mind? What does she really want? Is she really in love?

There’s something inherently endearing about Suriya’s performances. He plays a more-money-than-God richie-rich businessman, a common man or a powerful deity with the same likeability, niceness and mass-friendly charisma one has come to expect from the actor. He essays Sanjay with a marked restraint, reining in the action-heavy side of his persona, trading them in for a measured, emotive, intelligent character grappling with childhood trauma and attention and affection from a much younger woman, while doing what’s “right”.

Radikaa Sarathkumar is the film’s emotional core. In the hands of a lesser actor, her role could well have turned caricaturish (it sure feels as if it’s leaning that way in the first half), but she veers it off the edge of that precipice, curve-balling it back to a sense of gravitas that only comes with years of experience.

Mamitha Baiju as the bubbly Maddy plays her age and the naivete that comes with it. If the act comes across as relatable, it is because she brings a clued-in reading of the role and never goes over-the-top. Her chemistry with Suriya and Radikaa is one of the film’s high-points.

Without writer-director Venky Atluri at the helm of things, though, this one would have been a very different tale. His dialogues and the overall quality of writing and his ability to draw the most from his actors, shines through. He isn’t reinventing the wheel when it comes to the storytelling, but it’s easy to sit through and enjoy despite some obvious flaws because, in the larger scheme of things, it all comes together very smoothly. The film’s music is functional and nice, but it is the lyrics that are memorable and rather lovely.

When it comes to age-gap romances and societal taboos surrounding it, Yash Chopra’s “Lamhe” comes immediately to mind, but while that characterization seems creepy in retrospect, “Vishwananth & Sons” has no such hangups. The central premise – a younger woman falling for a man twice her age – is deftly and maturely managed by Atluri and team and the ensemble that never overshadows the principal cast, a usual misstep in films of this genre.

As family dramas go, “Vishwanath & Sons” is recommended watching. Preferably in theatres. For a change, the reason is not spectacle, but to witness the growth of the genre and successfully conversing – not talking down to, a younger audience that wouldn’t have been interested otherwise.