Birth of a Nation, in the Words of Salman Rushdie

To do cinematic justice to ’s novel it would take a razzle-dazzle entertainer with Bollywood flair and a literary bent, someone equally at home with comedy and allegory, ghosts and little snot-nosed boys, Indian history and Indian myth.

In short, through some kind of hocus-pocus abracadabra (Mr. Rushdie is fond of pileups and lists without commas), a directorial equivalent of the author would need to be conjured. But there’s little magic and even less sense of the storyteller as magician in the modest, respectful adaptation directed by , a filmmaker whose socially engaged naturalism seems a mismatch with Mr. Rushdie’s gleeful too-muchness.

Still, Mr. Rushdie, who wrote the screenplay (and does the curiously flat voice-over), meets Ms. Mehta halfway. In wrestling his bursting-at-the-seams, sometimes wearying epic into movie-acceptable size, he has pared it of authorial quirks and compressed it, lopping off subplots and characters and flights of fancy.

What’s left is the core of the story told straight, from beginning to end, with none of the novel’s compulsive prognosticating and backward glancing. That may suit the straightforward style of Ms. Mehta (“Fire,” “Earth,” ) but it makes for a movie that, if never exactly dull, feels drained of the mythic juice that powers the book, which won the in 1981.

Their more compelling grotesqueries shorn or diminished, the characters march in a now-this, now-that way through history, from the early part of the 20th century to independence to the days after Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency in the ’70s, and dart around the subcontinent, from Kashmir to Agra to Bombay to West Pakistan to East Pakistan (soon to be Bangladesh).

The bigger story, about India, is told through a smaller one, about a family, and especially one boy: Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of the midnight hour on Aug. 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s birth as a free country. There are 1,001 children born at that hour, all with special powers, but many have died by the time Saleem (Darsheel Safary as a boy; Satya Bhabha as an adult) discovers that he can hear the other children’s voices in his head as if he were some kind of all-India radio. (That’s his power, one of the best.)

When the midnight’s children join Saleem for chatty, contentious meetings, the camera’s focus goes soft, which seems fitting, as the children are mostly indistinct here, practically an afterthought, and without much metaphorical power. When “the Widow” â€" Mrs. Gandhi (Sarita Choudhury) â€" persecutes them during her Emergency, you wonder why she bothers.

In any case, they take a back seat to Saleem and his family’s story. There are infants switched at birth â€" one rich, one poor â€" revelations about parenthood, amnesia, war, riots, sudden shifts in fortune and, most satisfyingly, a kind of mother-son reunion between Saleem and his ayah that would do a Bombay talkie proud.

Ms. Mehta seems most at home detailing the family life of the young Saleem in Bombay. The two women who rule that universe, his mother (Shahana Goswami) and the ayah (Seema Biswas) â€" the perpetrator of that baby switching â€" give the film emotional ballast that’s lost when Saleem leaves for Pakistan.

Despite the Hindi-movie outlines of the plot, even more evident in its stripped-bare state, Mr. Rushdie and Ms. Mehta have avoided the temptation of turning “Midnight’s Children” into an ersatz Bollywood production. That’s probably wise. But the film needs an injection of Bollywood’s unembarrassed, anything-goes, bigger-than-life spirit, which embraces willy-nilly â€" as does Mr. Rushdie’s novel â€" the vulgar, the fanciful and the frankly unbelievable.

Midnight’s Children

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by Deepa Mehta; written by Salman Rushdie, based on his novel; director of photography, Giles Nuttgens; edited by Colin Monie; music by Nitin Sawhney; production design by Dilip Mehta; costumes by Dolly Ahluwalia; produced by David Hamilton; released by Paladin and 108 Media. In English and Hindi, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Satya Bhabha (Saleem Sinai), Darsheel Safary (Saleem Sinai as a boy), Shahana Goswami (Mumtaz/Amina), Rajat Kapoor (Aadam Aziz), Seema Biswas (Mary Pereira), Shriya Saran (Parvati), Siddharth (Shiva), Ronit Roy (Ahmed Sinai), Rahul Bose (General Zulfikar), Charles Dance (William Methwold), Sarita Choudhury (Indira Gandhi) and Kulbushan Kharbanda (Picture Singh).