Movie Review: The Namesake

The Namesake, based on the novel of the same name by Jhumpa Lahiri, is the story of two generation of an Indian family and their struggles to adjust to the West (in the older generation) and to understand the East (in the younger generation. Throughout The Namesake Mira Nair works to draw careful comparisons between New York City and Calcutta, allowing us some measure of understanding often before the characters themselves find it.

This comparison and unification is brought to us largely through architecture (appropriately, as this is the profession of The Namesake's protagonist, Gogol) and reminds us that the United States and India both possess colonial history and can easily be considered a new world or The New World depending on who you are and in which direction you are traveling. And it is traveling that everyone in The Namesake is doing seemingly constantly.

Planes and trains and occasionally cars and rickshaws take us across both India and America, reminding us that each are vast and continually foreign landscapes on which we, and The Namesake's characters, are merely small players. Not that this notion prevents The Namesake from having an epic tone. Rather, this is almost inevitable with Nair, who has a habit of making movies about small and often internal stories and articulating them in vast, cinematic language.

Unfortunately, Nair dials up the emotional intensity and symbolic moments early and often in The Namesake, making it difficult to journey or experience revelation alongside her characters. Throughout The Namesake I wanted time to savor recurring details, such as the image of shoes by a door -- meaning visitors, foreign culture, death, hospitality, memory, home -- but we were always too quickly hustled onto the next equally interesting, but overloaded symbolic piece of the film's landscape.

The Namesake also suffers in that, while a compelling story the draw of the book is largely the poetry of its language, which cannot effectively be translated into film. As such, one feels a bit dragged along from landmark to landmark in the story, unable to savor the journey, which is a problematic thing in a film about journeys.

Luckily, strong performances from the leads including Kal Penn, who as Gogol conveys a fascinating mixture of vulnerability, intellect and stereotypical American male swagger, and Tabu, who is ageless, graceful and raw in her performance as Ashima, keep the film engaging. Nair also mostly avoids allowing The Namesake or its actors to step out of themselves to help Anglo audiences understand Bengali culture. With one or two small exceptions, The Namesake masters the art of show, don't tell, although I'll grant this may occasionally confuse those who either haven't read the book or don't have exposure to the idea of a "good name" and a "pet name," a dichotomy which constantly, although surprisingly subtly reminds us of Gogol's cultural struggles throughout the film.

Unfortunately, minor characters, including Gogol's WASP-y girlfriend are so stereotypical they don't convincingly serve the function they were mean to address. I suspect this to be more a function of The Namesake being a two- instead of a three-hour film, but it's still irksome. Although, in the interest of full disclosure, I actually have more than one Bengali in my romantic history, so I may be being a bit defensive here. Certainly, I hope I've never been as much of an idiot as this character.

Ultimately, The Namesake is engaging and moving, especially for anyone who feels the tug of two cultures, whatever they may be. It is perhaps harder to connect to if you do not have a particularly close (even if troubled) relationship with your family. Beautiful and honest, The Namesake surprises not with its beauty, but with the sources of that beauty. For all its problems, this is a solid film that will certainly endure and is a good offering for those looking for a mature drama that is neither exploitive nor contrived.