Fahadh Faasil and Vadivelu more than deliver the goods, but the film, as a whole, fails to live up to their on-screen partnership, observes Arjun Menon.
Vadivelu has been on a career resurgence of late with his grounded, brooding performance in Mari Selvaraj's Maamannan that explored a whole new toolkit of the legendary comedian.
We get an even more mature and melancholy version of Vadivelu with Maareesan, a film that relies on his ability to showcase his emotional turmoil.
He shares the screen with one of the most exciting actors in the country, Fahadh Faasil.
Velayudham (Vadivelu) is an aging Alzheimer's patient, who is having a hard time making sense of the fast-moving world around him.
After a supposed quick break-in heist Dhayalan (Fahadh Faasil) finds himself tangled with the helpless Velayudhan, who mistakes him for his son.
The film uses the awkward interactions between the thief and the Alzheimer's patient for smart laughs without being insensitive at any point.
Maareesan is a study on the peculiarity of the human memory and how we perceive those who come into our lives.
The film rarely challenges the viewer but follows stimulating strands of ideas about human interactions.
V Krishna Moorthy's screenplay takes its own sweet time to connect the dots and make sense of the awkward friendship, and Director Sudheesh Sankar captures it with minimum fuss.
The visual language of the film feels like an evening soap, and is not invested in image-making.
The beats flow, characters talk their problems out, and we are given momentary bursts of candour.
There are flashback scenes and songs that feel overdrawn, and the film fails to maintain the chirpy feel.
There is a sense of formulaic comfort to the way the events reveal themselves. Even Fahadh Faasil's performance sometimes feels derivative of his much more incisive work in the Malayalam film, Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum.
The cheeky humour and heartening vulnerability of Fahadh's performance is seen in a lower register here, but the actor makes the most of the material provided.
Vadivelu is in full form as the forgetful middle-aged man, who has his hands full after the bizarre ride that he takes with an unassuming stranger.
But the occasional forgetfulness, clumsy interactions, and wayward travel destinations become cumbersome after a while.
Still, Vadivelu makes the clumsy emotional thread work.
Women are not the major players in this story, but they are put through the cinematic wringer by way of the troubling experiences they face in the film's second half.
Like many mainstream outings from recent times, the film is focused on the folly of the male bond, and consequently, women end up becoming secondary screenwriting devices to drive the abrasive segments forward.
Maareesan regains its momentum to a large extent by Yuvan Shankar Raja's score that underlines the emotional turmoil of the characters.
The film slowly slips away from being the small, self-satisfied, talky picture about guys bantering through an emotional mess, to becoming a tropey, hammering, and gory finale that aims to be too many things at once.
Fahad Faasil and Vadivelu more than deliver the goods, but the film, as a whole, fails to live up to their on-screen partnership.
Maareesan Review Rediff Rating:
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