Vishwanath & Sons review: warmth, sanded smooth

Vishwanath & Sons opens with a spikier idea than its heirloom-firm title suggests. Sanjay Vishwanath (Suriya), businessman and Olympic-medallist pistol shooter, has sworn off marriage for reasons the film withholds, so when his mother Nirmala (Radhika Sarathkumar) starts aching for a grandchild, he opts for surrogacy. Then the baby develops a life-threatening condition, and the only matching donor is Maddy (Mamitha Baiju), a twenty-year-old carrying wounds of her own. A single father by choice, a young woman who refuses to leave, an age gap nobody in the house knows what to do with. That is a lot of interesting trouble under one roof.

The first half spends it well. Venky Atluri keeps things breezy and genuinely funny, and the humour is franker than this genre usually allows, staged without a hint of sleaze. Mamitha, in her third superstar pairing this year after Jana Nayagan and Kara, steals scene after scene, walking the line between endearing and exhausting and mostly landing right. Her scenes with Radhika are the film’s most convincing relationship, more than anything between the leads. And Suriya, three months after Karuppu, is more restrained than he has been in years of star vehicles, all hard-set face and clipped manner, particularly effective in the one scene where Sanjay’s composure finally breaks.

The film is at its best when it simply lets its two leads talk.

Then the second half arrives with the familiar rhythms of a Telugu family drama. Another family’s troubles pull the film to Ooty and swallow a long stretch of the 161-minute runtime, conflicts are introduced and tidied away within minutes, and two fight scenes exist mainly because a Suriya film is supposed to have them. The film is also oddly forgiving of its married men behaving badly, a running gag it milks for laughs and then quietly pardons.

Suriya’s tycoon carries the film’s gloss lightly, until the script insists he also carry its conscience.

The bigger problem is what the film does to its people. Maddy is written as genuinely damaged, possibly carrying generational trauma, and the film’s remedy is home food and bonding with grandma. Sanjay may look flinty, but everything he actually does is so relentlessly noble that it starts reading as virtue signaling. Everyone falls agreeably in line. The frustrating part is that feel-good doesn’t require this. The Holdovers, Silver Linings Playbook and Perfect Days all warm you precisely because their people stay prickly. Atluri sands his characters smooth instead, and the film loses the edge it kept promising.

The action turns up out of obligation, and the film visibly relaxes once it’s over.

The craft is comfortable. G.V. Prakash Kumar’s songs barely register beyond one melody and mostly stall the story besides, Nimish Ravi shoots the domestic stretches with real warmth, and the second half could have lost twenty minutes without anyone missing them. The ending, to Atluri’s credit, refuses the predictable route and lands on something practical rather than cute.

Vishwanath & Sons is likeable, often more than that. With a tighter script and the nerve to let its characters stay difficult, it could have been something special.