nwasianweekly.com
March 17, 2007

Photo by Mira Nair

(From left) Kal Penn, Irrfan Khan, Sahira Nair and Tabu are among the stars of “The Namesake,” a film adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s critically acclaimed novel.

“The Namesake” doesn’t live up to potential

By N.P. Thompson
For the Northwest Asian Weekly

Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2003 novel The Namesake was an entertaining, deeply moving, altogether illuminating look at South Asian life along the Cambridge-Yale-Manhattan corridor. The book provides the basis for Mira Nair’s new film, and although the movie is more-or-less faithful to the events of the novel, it misses the spirit of Lahiri’s work. There’s a haunted quality to the book that eludes Nair and her screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala. And the love of literature, so central to Lahiri’s vision, hardly registers here at all.

The story begins in the 1970s and spans 30 years in the lives of the Ganguli family, crosscutting frequently between Calcutta and America. As traditional Bengalis, Ashoke, a plain-Jane of a man whose face is imprisoned by large, unflattering spectacles, and Ashima, a gorgeous young woman who dresses in bright yellow and lavender saris, unite in a marriage arranged by their parents. The newlyweds migrate to New York in the midst of an ice-cold winter and begin a family of their own.

Initially I thought the actress Tabu to be too glamorous for the role of Ashima, but this 36-year-old convincingly takes the character from a girl of 20 to a graying widow approaching 50. Radiant and soulful, she’s the single best reason to see this picture. When we first meet Ashima, she sings Indian classical music with sitar accompaniment. Tabu is never lovelier than in a Christmas dinner scene some decades later, when she mentions wanting to take up singing again, if she could only find a teacher who’ll accept a student her age.

The superb cinematographer Frederick Elmes, who has often collaborated with Ang Lee and David Lynch, gives “The Namesake” a distinctive look of its own. You can see that he and Nair had fun playing around with inventively textured visual effects, such as rotating shadows of a serpent and other exotic wildlife as they writhe against a wall in a child’s bedroom at night. A partition of clear, baubled glass within the foyer of the Gangulis’ suburban home distorts shapes and swirls colors in kaleidoscopic mosaics.

Unfortunately, the miscasting of Kal Penn in the title role brings the entire film down. The young star of such undistinguished fare as “Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle” and “Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj” simply cannot act worth a hill of lentils. The part of Gogol Ganguli, whose father Ashoke names him for the estimable Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, encompasses many different roles within a single role: disgruntled adolescent, romantic leading man, grieving son, inspired architect, betrayed husband. Penn flubs them all. His flat, uninflected voice carries no weight, and he plays dramatic scenes in clown mode, with eyes widened and mouth perpetually open.

In the movie, when Gogol’s father dies, the son instantly becomes a traditional Bengali. In the book, his resistance to tradition is the whole point. If only the filmmakers were more embracing of the novelist’s intent, to her themes of alienation and displacement, to what Lahiri describes as “Things for which it was impossible to prepare for but which one spent a lifetime looking back at … things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.”

“The Namesake” opens March 16 in Seattle theaters.

N.P. Thompson can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.

Send correspondence to:
Northwest Asian Weekly • P.O. Box 3468 • Seattle • WA  98114
Tel: 206.223.5559 •  Fax: 206.223.0626 • Email: info@nwasianweekly.com
Please bookmark this site: www.nwasianweekly.com.