The Namesake
“The Namesake” is a movie you’ll admire, because it tries so hard to show the everyday triumphs and tragedies of an Indian immigrant family, and because it gives two wonderful Bollywood stars, Tabu and Irfan Khan, a chance to display their talents more subtly than in the song-and-dance spectaculars produced in their homeland. (They even get a sex scene!) But you probably won’t love “The Namesake,” because it’s awkwardly adapted from a novel and feels overstuffed and shapeless. I can’t even figure out who the protagonist is supposed to be. The promotional materials suggest it’s Gogol Ganguli (played as an adult by Kal Penn), the New York-born son of immigrants Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli (Khan and Tabu). But Penn doesn’t show up until about the 45-minute mark, and he’s too much of a lightweight to make Gogol’s journey as compelling as his parents’. The best and most evocative scenes come early on, when Ashoke and Ashima are introduced, get married and move from Calcutta to Queens. Director Mira Nair illuminates the theme of dislocation through action, as when Ashima, trying to carve out a role for herself in an alien country, takes her husband’s clothes to a scary laundromat and shrinks them. She sobs in the bathroom, and Ashoke talks her down, tenderly; the actors are marvelous. More often, though, the movie explicitly informs the audience what it’s about. Ashima tells her husband she doesn’t want to raise their son in “this lonely country”; Ashoke responds that it would be wrong to deny him the opportunity of living in America. That’s the extent of the scene; there’s little context for it, so it just hangs there ineffectively. Later, the first words spoken by Gogol’s Caucasian girlfriend (Jacinda Barrett) are about whether his parents would rather him marry “a nice Indian girl.” Barrett manages to play a few grace notes, but her character is a device, designed to create a wedge between Gogol and his parents. As years go by in a blink and life-changing incidents pile up, the smaller moments that ground the story become fewer and less evocative. The overarching plot line involves Gogol’s name — the way he came to be named after a Russian writer, the way it reflects his frayed relationship with his parents. But Nair struggles to locate the drama in Gogol’s search for a comfortable identity. She’s an assured moviemaker, and she crafts lovely images throughout, but she’s not the first director who’s failed to wrangle a tricky, generation-spanning novel into compelling cinema.