A family struggles to embrace America

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Friday, March 16, 2007

If director Mira Nair had made the perfect adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's best-selling 2003 novel The Namesake, the movie would have offered a carefully detailed and supremely graceful account of two generations of an Indian family that encounters all the problems and dislocation associated with assimilation into American culture.

Fans of Lahiri's novel may find that Nair (the joyous Monsoon Wedding) misses perfection but does infuse the movie's characters with conflict and life. They will also discover some of the same relevant issues that illuminated the novel, namely identity and ethnic loyalty as viewed through an exacting family prism. Nair explores lives that become studies in the ways in which an immigrant family copes with the strains of a new and not-always-comprehensible life.

In this regard, the movie hits its target. The Namesake ambitiously reveals the gains and perils of assimilation, and it heightens awareness about how difficult it can be to strike the right balance between family demands and personal development - or perhaps to find any balance at all. The story begins when Ashoke (Irfan Khan) marries Ashima (Tabu). It's an arranged marriage between an engineer and the woman who accompanies him to America, where Ashoke has a teaching position at a university. Ashima suffers loneliness and alienation in her new home, a sparse apartment in Queens, N.Y.

As the tale unfolds, Khan and the wonderful Tabu make it clear that love and regard slowly bloom between Ashoke and Ashima, who eventually move to the suburbs in pursuit of additional opportunities for the good life. There their children - an American-born son and a daughter - are further separated from their Bengali roots.

The bulk of the movie centers on Gogol (Kal Penn), the son who grows up American and hastens to shed his Indian identity in a relationship with the super-WASPy but still-empathic Maxine (Jacinda Barrett). Gogol then swings in the other direction, plunging into a relationship with a Bengali woman (Zuleikha Robinson) who's immersed in her own identity struggles.

The movie makes much of Gogol's name. His father named him for the Russian writer for reasons that are best-discovered in the theater.

Penn, previously seen in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, this time gives a serious performance, capturing Gogol's struggle without entirely being overwhelmed by it. Driven and energetic, Gogol is being pushed in ways he doesn't fully understand; like someone impatiently skimming a dense book, he's skipping over whole parts of himself.

Obviously, Nair - working with screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala - knows this turf. But The Namesake, which alternates between Calcutta and the U.S., never quite finds an equivalent for Lahiri's prose, which has a deeper, more resonant quality than the movie. Stripped of Lahiri's voice, The Namesake plays like a series of episodes that don't always have the feel of a seamlessly evolving whole.

Still, the achievement of The Namesake shouldn't be minimized, especially in a moment when movies seldom create truly memorable characters. The Namesake leaves you feeling as if you've gotten to know the Ganguli family and nurturing a sense of commitment that their struggles not be forgotten.

The Namesake

A Bengali-American searches for his identity.

• Grade: B

• Rated: PG-13

• Running time: 122 minutes