Polyster gets a silken treatment in the hands of one of India's most accomplished technicians and raconteurs. Thanks in no small measure to Abhishek Bachchan's career-defining performance Guru stands tall because the big stars have played gizmo-gorged title roles with cold clinical detachment.

The flamboyantly gifted Indian moviemaker Mani Ratnam has an epic romantic temperament, like a reform-minded 19th-century novelist, with a great eye and a trunk full of Panavision lenses. Inspired by the rags-to-riches story of a real-life Indian petrochemical tycoon, the late Dhirajlal “Dhirubhai” Ambani, it's a realistically textured biographical thriller staged on an operatic scale. It aims at nothing less than the canonization of a new type of cultural icon for post-socialist India.
Renamed Gurukant “Gurubhai” Desai and played with an exhilarating mixture of high-stepping enjoyment and focused determination by Abishek Bachchan, the movie's Ambani surrogate is a village boy who lays the groundwork for a huge company by simply pouncing on opportunities that others miss. We enjoy rooting for this enterprising businessman hero, and not just because we identify with the character's delight at working out a clever new way to avoid paying excise taxes. He's a hero not in spite of the fact that he's a crafty corporate capitalist but because of it — because his textile factories have created tens of thousands of jobs, and because the ordinary people he recruited as shareholders have been hoisted out of poverty by his success.

Beginning in the early 1950s, Guru spans four decades in the life of the titular tycoon, Gurukant Guru Desai (Abhishek Bachchan), who rises from humble origins as the ne'er-do-well son of a village schoolmaster to become India's leading manufacturer of polyester. Along the way, he acquires a lovely wife (Aishwarya Rai), a few close friends and numerous enemies. His chief opponents are the members of India's press corps, who file story after story about his business-code violations and cozy relationships with top government officials. (The movie stacks the deck against these crusading journalists from the get-go, however, most notably in a scene where a reporter stages a damning photo and then publishes it as the real deal. Paging Jayson Blair!)