Analyse this (and a quick note on 3 Idiots)

The most entertaining put-down I’ve read recently was a long blog comment directed at all those annoying people who ask movie reviewers the question, “Why can't you just enjoy the movie for what it is? Why do you have to analyse it?” Do read the full comment on Aishwarya’s blog.
The “don’t analyse, just enjoy” line is very familiar; I hear it whenever I try to discuss a hugely popular film using any sentences more complicated than “This movie rocks from beginning to end!” Take Rajkumar Hirani’s 3 Idiots, a film I enjoyed a lot on the whole. It’s full of some really good bits and the first half in particular was outstanding. But watching the second half, I couldn’t help wondering why so many good Hindi films take the trouble to establish a nuanced thought process and then simply cop out of it at crucial times. Why does it feel like five different writers were sitting in a room, each trying to tug the film in a different direction?
For an example of what I’m talking about, consider a superb 20-minute stretch close to the film’s midway point: the scene where the three heroes (fun-loving students at an engineering college) make a public spectacle of their colleague Chatura, a teacher’s pet who learns everything by rote. The sequence begins by placing us, the viewer, in a position of identification with the three leads. When one of them plays a phone gag on Chatura while another switches around the words in a Hindi speech he has to recite (“balatkaar” for “chamatkaar”, etc), we approve of the prank; after all, Chatura is such a smug little toady. We then laugh our heads off at him as he makes the unintentionally ribald speech (it’s one of the great paisa-vasool/taali-maar scenes you’ll ever see). But then – in the scene that follows – the film briefly turns the tables on us by allowing us to see his anger and humiliation; to see him as a victim of a flawed educational system.
Taken together, the whole 20-minute section is a brilliantly sustained sequence of moral complexity – one of the best I've seen in a mainstream Hindi movie. It builds up in such a way that when Chatura denounces the “three idiots” on the rooftop, he's also denouncing us in a sense. (At any rate, anyone who has been through the formal-education grind in India - and done even moderately well in school or college - should find it very difficult to take any sort of higher moral ground against Chatura. To varying degrees, we've all done what he does.) But this train of thought is never really followed through. Instead, the film makes the predictable, feel-good, mass-audience-pleasing decision to let Chatura remain a buffoon and a comic foil, as if he were personally the villain of the piece instead of a tiny cog in a giant broken wheel.
This also leads to a disconnect between the film's (over)stated “message” and what actually happens at the end (something I felt was a problem in Taare Zameen Par as well). 3 Idiots spends over two-and-a-half hours preaching about how personal satisfaction and following your dreams are more important than “success” as society defines it (status, bank balance, size of car, etc). But in the last 10 minutes it can’t resist giving the audience the very superficial thrill of seeing that the Aamir character has ended up in a position where he can make the pompous Chatura grovel. (And besides, isn't his Ladakh lake bigger than the rich NRI’s indoor swimming pool?)
There are a few other examples of loose writing. Like the Javed Jaffrey sub-plot, thrown in only because they couldn't find another way to justify the Aamir character cutting himself off from everyone after college. And the lazy handling of the "10 years after" scenario, with Kareena improbably on the verge of getting married to the same moron she was engaged to a decade earlier (you get the impression the writers stuck with the fellow only because he was such a soft target for humour).
When I spoke to a friend about these little short-cuts, he said, “Well, yes, but we expect our Hindi films to be wishy-washy about these little things, right?” I know what he meant, but I’m starting to wish that our default expectation mode about basic internal consistency in our movies didn't always have to be set low – especially when the film is so good in many other ways, as 3 Idiots undoubtedly is.
P.S. Another gripe I have with the "don't be so analytical" complaint is that most people use it in a manipulative, selective way. The thought process goes something like this: "Whoa, you didn't love the film I loved?! *Hmm, rationalise, rationalise* That can only mean you're over-analytical/you think too much." It's the same thing as people telling you to be "objective" about a movie when what they really mean is "Agree with my [subjective] view of it."

P.P.S. Some related thoughts on analysing and enjoying in this old post about Om Shanti Om.