PK (2014)

Gosh, more than year has passed since my last Bollywood viewing. I attribute this mainly to my reluctance to watch longer movies. Indeed, I chose PK in part because it's "only" 153 minutes.

A space alien (A-lister Aamir Khan) who looks fully human, albeit with protruding ears and almost constantly wide eyes, takes a solo trip to India for peaceful research purposes. Before long, someone snatches his fancy necklace, which is really the remote to summon his spaceship. It's not clear how long he had planned to be away from the ship, but he soon grows desperate, partly because he has almost nothing else. He adopts the nickname "PK," because it sounds like the Hindi word for "tipsy," which he is frequently accused of being. The second main character, fledgling anchorwoman Jaggu (Anushka Sharma), notices PK when he passes out fliers saying, "Missing: God." Her boss is leery about covering stories that could provoke religious anger, but she's simply too interested in his unique perspective on the subject.

Physically, the only thing we know to be truly alien about PK is his telepathy. This power is not entirely to his advantage. For one thing, he has to hold someone's hand to read their mind. In India, this gesture is assumed to be seductive, and when he does it to another man, he's assumed to be confused (must not be much of an LGBT movement there). Only a prostitute allows him enough contact to learn to communicate decently for the region. (The film is unrated, but I'm thinking PG-13.) Furthermore, having never used language before, he is unaccustomed to deception being an option. No wonder people continue to think he's not right in the head. On the plus side, what better way than a superpower to convince Jaggu of his unspecified interplanetary origin?

PK does learn not to broadcast certain truths, but he trusts Jaggu after she shows him unusual generosity. He recounts how he gradually learned about the concept(s) of God, with a lot of mortifying trial and error. Since God has yet to grant his variously repeated request to get his remote back, he figures there's communication failure along the way -- perhaps a "wrong number."

Jaggu, for her part, is not crazy about her father's zealous brand of Hinduism, which got in the way of her recent romance with a Muslim (Sushant Singh Rajput). She will gladly help PK as best she can. In the course of interactions with her, he comes to new insights, including that many leaders across various religions must be either mistaken or lying. When he expresses this opinion on TV, he inspires youth across the nation to ask basic yet challenging questions during ritual services and catch the lack of a satisfying response on smartphone video.

If you're devout one way or another, you must suspect by now that this is not the flick for you. Well, I still hold a lot of respect for religions in general, but I wasn't too offended. OK, I might have been more so if there were more focus on Christianity, but none of the raised objections would invalidate an entire religion. When they don't point out personal hypocrisy, they simply note how a tenet appears to run contrary to the idea of a loving God. My greater concern is that it probably wouldn't be that easy in RL to shake up the system.

It helps that PK never becomes an atheist and rarely shows anything like anger. Nor is he like Valentine Michael Smith in Stranger in a Strange Land: His beliefs are easy to relate to. He also performs an admirably extraordinary act of love near the end -- the kind that provides no discernible benefit to himself.

No, he's not morally perfect. He knowingly breaks the law in front of officers in order to get free accommodations for the night. Worse, he gets away with stealing money and clothes from cars where people are getting it on, without paying them a second thought. You may think that his poverty justifies these acts, but I feel sorry for the people who will have to drive home naked with no cash.

PK has the same filmmakers and several of the same actors as 3 Idiots, and I detect a few more similarities: They're both "dumb-smart," alternating between explicit if not preachy thoughtfulness and mild vulgarity; they're primarily wacky comedies but with at least one shocking dramatic moment; and they have heart. I found PK marginally less funny and enlightening, but it offers more musical sequences. And fewer distracting snippets of English mixed into another language.

Indeed, I'd recommend PK even to people who normally have no use for Indian fare. Catch it on Netflix while it's still streaming.