How much you are going to be moved by Karan Johar’s latest production We Are Family depends on your EQ, or rather its bent. If the scenes of a terminally ill mother of three kids lying on her deathbed and admonishing her replacement stepmom about taking over the family can fling open wide the floodgates to your tear ducts, then the first thing you should do after reading this review is scoot off to a nearby theatre to book the tickets for this attempted kerchief-soaker. If not, then fall back on your patience to wait for one of the telly reruns of Chris Columbus’s subtly incisive 1998 film Stepmom, whose official remake We Are Family is.
Yes, for a change, Bollywood takes the right route to remake one of the hits from its more gifted though less productive elder cousin across the Atlantic. Handing over the directorial reins to the first-timer Siddharth Malhotra, producer Karan Johar relies on scriptwriter Venita Coelho (don’t be misled by her second name) and dialogue writer Niranjan Iyenger to Indianize the story of an emotional tug of war between two women - a divorced mom (Kajol) of three kids and the present girlfriend (Kareena Kapoor) of her ex hubby. Goes without saying that the former is more efficient in making a family than the latter, who is career-minded and ill-at-ease with kids who expectedly brand her as ‘Dayan’.
Stuck between the two is the man himself (Arjun Rampal), trying his best to do the balancing act between being a loving dad, caring ex hubby and devoted boyfriend. He loves his girlfriend, but can’t live without his kids from ex wife. His girlfriend loves him, so she tries to win over the kids (Aanchal Munjal, Nominath Ginsberg and Diya Sonecha). Thereby the two women end up in the same household. But the question is - can two women make a happy home? Not a chance in hell, some would hold. But it’s possible when one of them is bowing out and the other gradually stepping into the breach.
