Mira Nair's The Namesake is a film adaptation of a bestseller by Jhumpa Lahri about two generations of Indians. What a difference from her unsuccessful Vanity Fair! In this story about a Bengali couple who make a home in New York and whose American-born children must learn to live in two cultures, Nair, herself an Indian born in London, has found material she truly understands. Because it condenses a multi-generational novel the movie is crammed with incident, but its busy succession of scenes provides a novelistic richness and the action is put over by a winning cast.
Bollywood regulars play the parents. Ashoke ("Baba," an appealingly nerdy Irshan Khan) is a professor, bringing his arranged bride, a beautiful classical singer, Ashima (Tabu), to enjoy the New World -- gas 24 hours a day, a world of opportunity, and machines that shrink all her husband's sweaters -- as they tentatively and sweetly get to know and love each other. Later they have a girl, but it's their male first born who becomes the main character of the second half. Gogol Ganguli is oddly named, and therein hangs a tale. Playing Gogol from adolescence on is the young Indian-American comic Kal Penn (Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle) who here graduates with flying colors from the college humor of Harold and Kumar (which comes in handy in his first few scenes) into a mature dramatic role. Penn succeeds in embodying all the qualities that make this a wonderful movie, its love, humor, good will, and wry sense of cultural confusion.
We first see him as a ratty-haired, pot-smoking teenager. He tells a couple of stoner pals about how making out with a girl was wrecked when she asked his name.
"Gogol Ganguli"! they chirp. "End of seduction 101," says Gogol.
With his liquid black eyes and dark skin Kal Penn looks thoroughly Indian, alright, but his ironic, amused air may be American-made. When he opens his mouth, what comes out is 100% USA. Like his sister and a young bookish Francophile woman from another Bengali family visiting from London who both eventually become beautiful and chic, over time Gogol also turns from a gawky youth into a handsome, rather elegant man. Nair is as good at physical transformations as she is at cultural subtleties.
Facing conflicts over cultural identity, Kal Penn as Gogol Ganguli has some struggling to do but remains immensely likable. So does everybody in The Namesake except Maxime (Jacinda Barrett), an annoying, not very deeply portrayed rich white girl Gogol (who's changed his name to Nick now) gets involved with while studying architecture at Yale.
Nair keeps the Indian gemütlichkeit of some of her earlier movies but the novel adds a bitter edge of realism. This comes when, with his son at Yale, Gogol's father goes to Cleveland to teach for six months and suddenly dies there. The sight of "Baba's" "nice" but sterile apartment in Cleveland when he first arrives is chilling. It screams its emptiness -- an absence of all Indian culture offers: warmth, family, tradition. Ashima chose not to accompany Ashoke to Cleveland. When the tragedy happens he is alone. Their daughter has moved away, and "Nick" is with his WASP princess in Oyster Bay escaping from his ethnic background and he forgets even to call his mother to say he's okay.
He shaves his head in mourning when he learns of his father's death, and back home for the wake experiences a guilt that brings him back to his father and his name and the story behind it. In this context the self-centeredness of his culturally tone-deaf WASP girlfriend is highlighted. She seems to think she can go to India with them for the scattering of the father's ashes into the Ganges. She thinks it will be great fun. "No, it's a family thing," Gogol says, and he ejects her from his life.
"Nick" goes back to see the formerly bookish and odd Francophile girl from a London Bengali family. Moushume (Zuleikha Robinson) is now living in New York, available, and a very sexy woman. Their marriage follows almost too fast, but that's the point. Gogol's sister Sonia (Sahira Nair) has an American boyfriend, but this mixed relationship works and is accepted by their mother -- who decides to sell the house and spend six months a year in India returning to the practice of classical song. You can go home again, in fact you must. But if you're bi-cultural and second generation, it's tricky. Sonia and Gogol are left to work out their salvation with diligence
The conundrum of living in two cultures is embedded in the story of Gogol's name. But the beauty of it is that we get hints, not lectures or homilies. As "Baba" tells it, the name has something to do with a dangerous railway trip and a man with advice on the train; the impulse to travel, to explore; the need to give thanks for survival. The Gogol involved is him of The Overcoat. "We all, "Baba" says, came out of that overcoat."
The Namesake is partly a song of praise for America, the land of sky's the limit, of becoming whoever you want to be. It's also an affirmation that you can't get away from who you are. It's far more besides, but it's useless trying to spell out all the themes of a movie that's so satisfying and specific. With it, Nair has moved to a whole new level as a filmmaker.
Bollywood regulars play the parents. Ashoke ("Baba," an appealingly nerdy Irshan Khan) is a professor, bringing his arranged bride, a beautiful classical singer, Ashima (Tabu), to enjoy the New World -- gas 24 hours a day, a world of opportunity, and machines that shrink all her husband's sweaters -- as they tentatively and sweetly get to know and love each other. Later they have a girl, but it's their male first born who becomes the main character of the second half. Gogol Ganguli is oddly named, and therein hangs a tale. Playing Gogol from adolescence on is the young Indian-American comic Kal Penn (Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle) who here graduates with flying colors from the college humor of Harold and Kumar (which comes in handy in his first few scenes) into a mature dramatic role. Penn succeeds in embodying all the qualities that make this a wonderful movie, its love, humor, good will, and wry sense of cultural confusion.
We first see him as a ratty-haired, pot-smoking teenager. He tells a couple of stoner pals about how making out with a girl was wrecked when she asked his name.
"Gogol Ganguli"! they chirp. "End of seduction 101," says Gogol.
With his liquid black eyes and dark skin Kal Penn looks thoroughly Indian, alright, but his ironic, amused air may be American-made. When he opens his mouth, what comes out is 100% USA. Like his sister and a young bookish Francophile woman from another Bengali family visiting from London who both eventually become beautiful and chic, over time Gogol also turns from a gawky youth into a handsome, rather elegant man. Nair is as good at physical transformations as she is at cultural subtleties.
Facing conflicts over cultural identity, Kal Penn as Gogol Ganguli has some struggling to do but remains immensely likable. So does everybody in The Namesake except Maxime (Jacinda Barrett), an annoying, not very deeply portrayed rich white girl Gogol (who's changed his name to Nick now) gets involved with while studying architecture at Yale.
Nair keeps the Indian gemütlichkeit of some of her earlier movies but the novel adds a bitter edge of realism. This comes when, with his son at Yale, Gogol's father goes to Cleveland to teach for six months and suddenly dies there. The sight of "Baba's" "nice" but sterile apartment in Cleveland when he first arrives is chilling. It screams its emptiness -- an absence of all Indian culture offers: warmth, family, tradition. Ashima chose not to accompany Ashoke to Cleveland. When the tragedy happens he is alone. Their daughter has moved away, and "Nick" is with his WASP princess in Oyster Bay escaping from his ethnic background and he forgets even to call his mother to say he's okay.
He shaves his head in mourning when he learns of his father's death, and back home for the wake experiences a guilt that brings him back to his father and his name and the story behind it. In this context the self-centeredness of his culturally tone-deaf WASP girlfriend is highlighted. She seems to think she can go to India with them for the scattering of the father's ashes into the Ganges. She thinks it will be great fun. "No, it's a family thing," Gogol says, and he ejects her from his life.
"Nick" goes back to see the formerly bookish and odd Francophile girl from a London Bengali family. Moushume (Zuleikha Robinson) is now living in New York, available, and a very sexy woman. Their marriage follows almost too fast, but that's the point. Gogol's sister Sonia (Sahira Nair) has an American boyfriend, but this mixed relationship works and is accepted by their mother -- who decides to sell the house and spend six months a year in India returning to the practice of classical song. You can go home again, in fact you must. But if you're bi-cultural and second generation, it's tricky. Sonia and Gogol are left to work out their salvation with diligence
The conundrum of living in two cultures is embedded in the story of Gogol's name. But the beauty of it is that we get hints, not lectures or homilies. As "Baba" tells it, the name has something to do with a dangerous railway trip and a man with advice on the train; the impulse to travel, to explore; the need to give thanks for survival. The Gogol involved is him of The Overcoat. "We all, "Baba" says, came out of that overcoat."
The Namesake is partly a song of praise for America, the land of sky's the limit, of becoming whoever you want to be. It's also an affirmation that you can't get away from who you are. It's far more besides, but it's useless trying to spell out all the themes of a movie that's so satisfying and specific. With it, Nair has moved to a whole new level as a filmmaker.