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The Namesake

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

A beautiful young Indian woman named Ashima meets a young man named Ashoke in a meeting arranged by their parents. But instead of shunning the arranged marriage in favor of some Hollywood dream of true love, she agrees to marry him, and they move halfway across the world to New York, far away from her family and her life.

Thus begins Mira Nair’s new movie The Namesake, a sprawling family drama based on the acclaimed novel by Jhumpa Lahiri. The fact that it’s an adaptation is very obvious thanks to the episodic plotting and the way the movie never decides who its main character is. But the straightforwardly compelling drama that Ashima and her family goes through makes the movie feel uniquely genuine.

The first section of the film deals mostly with Ashima and Ashoke’s post-marriage courtship and birth of their two children. Eventually, we segue to the story of their firstborn son, played by Kal Penn. In India, the custom is to have two names: a real name, chosen by relatives, and a nickname. Ashoke wants his son’s nickname to be Gogol after his favorite author, but since they have to put something on the birth certificate and they don’t have a real name ready, Gogol is what gets written down. As he grows up, he eventually wants a more Americanized name, but Gogol tends to stick with him; eventually, of course, he must grow to a deeper understanding of his parents' culture and his namesake. (Hence, of course, the title.)

Small details like this make up the fabric of the movie. Yes, there are many big dramatic plot points, but the characters all feel completely realized thanks to the realistic way in which they’re treated: this is their story, and these are the things that happen to them. Even Gogol’s sister, who could otherwise feel completely superfluous to the story, comes off as a three-dimensional human being thanks to the sharp choices made for her character in only a few scenes. In a typical screenplay, she would be discarded to streamline the plot. Here, she’s not a screenplay pawn, she’s Gogol’s sister.

Kal Penn is the big name here, at least to American audiences, and he’s mostly known for teen comedies like Van Wilder and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. The dramatic role works for him; he doesn’t appear to try to overplay or overanalyze the character, nor does he ever resort to the type of caricature he’s played before. We’re simply treated to a young man at the cusp of adulthood. The two relationships he has in the movie, with the American Maxine (Jacinda Barrett) and the Indian Moushumi (Zuleikha Robinson), are both treated with the realism of the rest of the film.

Still, ...