
Tanvi The Great Cast/Actors: Anupam Kher and Iain Glen
Tanvi The Great Movie Director: Anupam Kher
Tanvi The Great Movie Production House: Anupam Kher Studio & NFDC
Tanvi The Great Movie Release Date: 18 July 2025
Tanvi The Great Movie Available On: In Cinemas
Tanvi The Great Movie Released/Available In Languages: Hindi
Tanvi The Great Movie Runtime: 2h 40m
Tanvi The Great Movie Critic Review:
A story that salutes the bravery of the Indian army and cajoles the world to look at challenged people as different but not any less than the rest, deserves a round of applause. Marrying the two laudable thoughts, writer-director Anupam Kher, accompanied by co-writers Abhishek Dixit and Suman Ankur, earns respect for a sincerely mounted human drama with the authentic backdrop of Lansdowne, the army base and training centre.
There’s an impactful start with Captain Samar Raina (Karan Tacker) talking to Major Srinivasan (Arvind Swamy) about the seven-year-old love of his life, daughter Tanvi. The army officers are headed to Siachen, Samar enthusiastic about his posting in the world’s “highest and coldest battleground”. But the army jeep is blown to bitsen route.
It’s an emphatic opening that establishes an early link between Tanvi and the Major, besides underlining the heartbreak that hovers over the families of army personnel.
The drama starts moving 15 years later, when Tanvi (Subhangi Dutt) is a young adult. Her widowed mother Dr Vidya Raina (Pallavi Joshi) is heading to the US for a programme by the World Autism Foundation and she drops off her daughter at Lansdowne to live with her grandfather, Retired Col Pratap Raina (Anupam Kher), Samar’s father.
It’s a shaky start for the granddaughter-grandfather relationship, the army man’s life upturned by autistic Tanvi. She’s not just different, she’s difficult too – difficult to get used to. Showdowns and frustrations mount. And when the young adult who can’t tie her shoelaces or cross a doorstep with ease, takes a stubborn stand that she’ll train for and join the army, the impossibility prompts more worry lines on grandpa’s forehead.
Anupam has an interesting cast and crew in place: Brigadier Joshi (Jackie Shroff) with his instinctive sensitivity to Tanvi’s “difference”, Urdu spouting music guru Raza Saab (Boman Irani) who recognises Tanvi’s natural gift as singer, Nassar as Brigadier Rao leading the final panel that meets and picks the best candidates for the army and MM Keervani as the composer making opera-scale music.
However, noble intent gets tripped like untied shoelaces when a theme driven by passion does not make the required connect.
Battle fatigue sets in with extraneous characters like Raza Saab (dressed weirdly) who makes little contribution to the main track, unnecessary sequences like the Army Ball, forced situations like Brig Joshi’s influencer-son downgrading the army for Tanvi’s stand to stand out and shine, the many song situations where MM Kreem does not always rise to the occasion (except for an occasional ‘Manchala’), the convenient presence of Major Srinivasan (with a limp after the accident) as the training officer who owes Tanvi’s late father, a CGI-generated bird Tanvi relates to, the clumsy Raza-rescue with parallels to the army truck accident, the Krishna Temple which Tanvi promises to enter only when her biggest dream is fulfilled but enters it anyway a few scenes later to sing yet another song (‘Man Mohana’), and Tanvi’s never-ending goal.
The established cast of Anupam Kher, Jackie Shroff and Arvind Swamy play their parts with expected competence and Karan Tacker has a charm of his own. But Tanvi does not draw the empathy required of the main character. Instead of feeling drawn to an endearing autistic, Tanvi feels more like a temperamental, tantrum-throwing young adult. Even her malaprops don’t add up to a chuckle.
A Billy Wilder-Jack Lemon blockbuster comedy Avanti (1972) had the line, “Permisso?” followed by “Avanti” (welcome, come in) before every kissing and lovemaking scene. It gets transposed to “Permission to hug?” from “Mumma” Raina to Tanvi. The cuteness doesn’t come along with the borrowed permission.
When the core is as sensitive as autism, it feels insensitive not to be able to applaud it. But that’s where a crisp, entertaining and emotive screenplay must match intent.
Watch it or not: The viewer needs as much patience and understanding as a grandpa needs to handle/discover and appreciate the autistic.
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