Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2007 > March > 28 > Entry
Forging culture with ‘The Namesake’
Movies: An advance look at my review of “The Namesake,” which opens at the Arbor on Friday.
Usher: This must be about India.
Customer: Yes, it is.
Usher: I’ve never seen so many Indians in one place.
Customer: You must not live north …
Usher: Cedar Park, that’s about as north as you can get.
Customer: Every Saturday at Wells Branch — the theater that closed — they show Hindu … I mean Hindi movies, and the place was always packed.
The yearning for a mainstream crossover hit that appeals to American and South Asian audiences is more than just a movie producer’s daydream. From the evidence of the multifarious crowd at the preview screening of “The Namesake” this week, audiences ache for a movie that depicts the convergence of Indian, American and Asian American experiences.
This movie, performed in English, Bengali and Hindi, among other languages, will not fulfill those longings exactly, although it comes close.
Later, the Americans behind me cracked up knowingly as the Indian couple’s two children, now in the suburbs, predictably adopted teen culture: slang, casual clothing, minor drugs, sexual freedom.
Both contingents joined in laughter and audible sympathy as the story took a sterner turn and the Gangulis faced heartaches, twists of fortune and devastating loss. Profound family guilt and longing for trappings of the Old World are not exclusive properties of earlier American immigrants.
For a good part of the movie, the burden of translating these trials into comedy and drama fall on the shoulders of two mature, sensitive and subtle actors: Irfan Khan, who plays a bookish professor with a thirst for world travel; and Tabu, a graceful Bollywood actor who manages to make even a phone call to her son a minor song-and-dance of revelatory movements and vocalizations.
The title character, Gogol Ganguli, is played by Kal Penn, a light comedian best known for “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” and “Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj.” Penn specializes in outrageously typical young Americans who happen to trace their ethnic heritages to Asian or Middle Eastern backgrounds.
The audience subsequently tolerates Penn’s Gogol as he rises in the architecture profession, adopts the family of his blonde girlfriend and trims his hair for a more uptown lifestyle. The trick, for the movie’s makers, is enticing viewers into weeping along with Gogol as he faces cataclysm and shears off his hair completely (his follicles play a symbolic role, if you haven’t guessed).
If our response to Penn in mourning is not exactly, well, as we might react to the more formidable actor who shares his last name, his Gogol — and his hair — continue to evolve into more ambiguous adulthood. Gogol, like other Bengali characters in the movie, never fits into one culture or another completely, and they come to understand that’s part of the first or second generation immigrants’ bargain.
Director Mira Nair (“Monsoon Wedding,” “Vanity Fair”) trails behind the David Lean and Merchant/Ivory traditions of ravishing landscapes, dazzling displays of natural light and, especially in this case, multithread fabrics revealed in doting close-ups. The symbolism is light-handed, except in the case of bridges, which muscle onto the screen whether we are in Calcutta or New York.
A gentleness strokes the heart of “The Namesake.” The characters are exposed to emotional, not physical, jeopardy, nothing outside the almost universal human experience. This balminess pushes the audience along on warm waves of familiarity and strangeness but ultimately fails to sink deep into our consciousnesses.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: By Michael Barnes
Comments
By Varsha Naik
April 5, 2007 3:53 PM | Link to this
This is one of the few movies I have seen that truely come close to the reality portrayed in the book by Jhumpa Lahiri.
It was a moving story that made me cry and laugh as I watched the movie and pictured myself in the shoes of the characters as they struggle to reach a middle ground about their identity. Are they Indian or American, or both - and how much of each?
Tabu and Kal Penn were for me the best characters. No doubt that Irrfan Khan is fabulous too, but as his character is more docile in general, I tended to focus on Tabu the most. All three main characters, being non-Bengali, take on the role so well and you would never know the difference.
A fantastic watch and touching story that will live on forever as the book and now as the film.
By mary margaret
March 30, 2007 12:15 PM | Link to this
Ray and I just returned from two weeks in India, mainly Dehli, Agra and Rahasthan. I took along, as I always do, a piece of fiction Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize winner, "The Interpreter of Maladies" a group of short stories about the cultural, religious, and social/economic clashes of those who immigrate from east to west and perhaps back again. This book was a treasure to read as we experienced through the lens of our western heritage the kalidioscope that is India in the areas where we traveled. I am anxious to see "Namesake", and congratulate Mira Nair on her exceptional body of work which focuses upon the "seesaw" of cultures and of individual identity.