The Goat Life-The Gruffest of all Time
SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT
You're waiting for your ride at the airport. Finally the driver shows up, inspects your passport and hurries you into a car. Unfortunately, you don't speak the local language and end up as a desert slave for a couple of years. Sound familiar? Hopefully not. But for the hero of the story, Najeeb Muhammed, this happened in real life.
The Goat Life, based on the novel Aadujeevitham and titled as such on Netflix , chronicles the harrowing abduction of an Indian migrant worker whose hopes of working as a "helper" in a company are ironically turned to dust within hours. Najeeb Muhammed's true story is well-documented and exposes a world hidden to most Westerners- particularly Americans- international slave labor.
Occasionally, kidnap victims make front page news in America barring any other more exciting and palatable story. However, the victim is soon forgotten amid the fast-pace of breaking news. How much more the forgotten victims from foreign countries who are duped into handing over large sums of money for the chance of a better job in a foreign land. The visa process is often handled by a middleman and the "applicant" follows sparse instructions before arriving in his new employer's country. As one grim subtitle notes, "thousands of victims" have died in the desert having never received the job they expected or money, leaving their relatives confused and grieving.
In Najeeb's case, he exhibits galling naivete after arriving in Saudi Arabia with his friend, Hakeem (K.R. Gokul). Neither of the two men have any idea who is supposed to meet them and fail to call anyone to notify them of their whereabouts. They don't even have the sense to contact Security before leaving the airport- hours after arriving- with a total stranger.
Before you're too hard on him, keep in mind that Najeeb hails from a remote Indian village, was grossly under-educated and had never been abroad. He literally made every rookie mistake that Americans are repeatedly warned about from the time we are kids- don't go anywhere with strangers, notify someone of your whereabouts, call the police if you feel unsafe. But, of course, Americans are raised to be extremely wary of anyone we don't know.
You can guess what happens next: cruelty, forced labor, starvation and mercifully, escape! Running away in the Saudi Arabian desert is probably the worst place to escape and Najeeb encounters all the perils one would expect before finally making it out in an appealing visual spectacle on the level of Life of Pi.
Like Pi, Najeeb's escape becomes an epic journey in cinematic virtuosity. The beauty of the desert is juxtaposed with the cruelty of the desert. Vast expanses of endless sand both help and harm the Characters as they trek towards "the road" just as Pi was both soothed and confronted by an Ocean while searching for Land.
Played by Prithviraj Sukumaran, Najeeb's innocent optimism dramatically dessicates to a pessimistic and animalistic existence as his hope of escape fades. Several stylized flashback scenes of his life in India blend akimbo with his desert miseries, heightening the tension and yearning of the audience to make sure he gets back home.
No detail is overlooked in this odyssey. The animals Najeeb are forced to take care of act human, similar to the animals in Pi, adding a welcome magical respite from the horrific realities of goat-herding and camel keeping in the middle of nowhere. Najeeb's appearance radically shrinks from a robust, happy & lucid man to an embittered, half-crazed grumpy skeleton of a man- more animal than human. Bible readers will instantly be reminded of Jacob and his struggles in the desert.
The Arab kidnappers, powerfully played by Sudanese-Arab actor Rik Aby (Jasser) and Talib Al-Balushi (Kafeel) will put the fear of God in you. Al-Balushi's character is the main kidnapper who deliveres Najeeb to Aby's character who is stationed in the desert and truly makes Najeeb's life a living hell. However, Aby infuses Jasser with a grudging humanity and sardonic humor, similar to Pesci's character in Goodfellas, humanizing his appeal and creating a fascinating contrast with his motives. Kafeel, definitely cruel with a murderous streak, uses sarcasm and colorful threats to balance out his frequent rage. After Najeeb's escape, Kafeel indeed catches up with Najeeb in a terrifying encounter on the same scale as when one of Jurassic Park's early "visitors" faced off with a raptor in an enclosed room.
The entire piece is carefully polished, scene by scene, to create a gripping masterpiece, taking a worst-case scenario and still excavating beauty and hope for the audience to revel in. Blessy, the director, wound an adventure around a polarizing social issue while unapologetically judging it as inexcusable and managing to maintain the humanity of all parties.
At a run time of just over 2.5 hours, The Goat Life fills every moment with the full gamut of the most undesirable of human emotions: tension, conflict, fear, grief and hopelessness, yet Blessy, also lines the entire movie with the possibility of the hope of rescue, the green, blissful beauty of India and the tawny, exotic chroma of the desert tinged with its unyielding sandy terror, gripping the audience without sermonizing about the apparent injustice of the situation.
Philosophically, the tone of the movie is more romantic than reactive stirring a strange longing to see these beautiful foreign places that mask so much unrealized potential and pain. The movie awakens the conscience but, more suggestively, opens Western eyes to unfamiliar terrains and unchanged patterns of life that we abandoned ages ago. The mix of foreign and familiar, ancient and modern cannot fail to draw you into Najeeb's journey while making you grateful you get to live a good life and not the GOAT Life.
Rating 4.8 out of 5 stars
Grade A
The Goat Life is currently playing on Netflix. I recommend watching the movie in Hindi with English subtitles.
