REVIEW: The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake is one of my favorite novels. The weekend of March 9 an eponymous film adaptation directed by Indian Mira Nair and starring Kal Penn (Superman Returns, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle) opened on a limited number of screens around the country.

This weekend I finally got around to seeing the film at the Arclight Theaters in Hollywood and was very impressed. Mira Nair's The Namesake is one of the rare film adaptations that is at least as compelling as the book it is based upon. (The canonical example is of course, the Lord of the Rings films, or earlier, The Godfather).

Lahiri's The Namesake is an engrossing novel about family, identity, guilt and assimilation. It is a brilliant characterization of the bicultural nature of the immigrant experience. In this case, the immigrants are from India, ethnic Bengalis but the themes resonate with anyone who has felt like an outsider.

There are subtle changes made by screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala (Mississippi Masala, Salaam Bombay!) to Lahiri's novel which I believe actually improve the emotional impact of the story. In the book, Ashoke and Ashima lived unhappily together in Cambridge, Massachusetts and later moved to the Boston suburbs. Keeping them and the family in New York makes the story slightly more streamlined. Also, in the book the fragile mental state of Ashima after the children are born is a more prominent aspect of the family. The role of the sister Sonia is a thankless one in the book and the movie doesn't improve things much, although the actress does a rather good job of impersonating a spoiled American teenager.

As usual, I don't want to give away too much of the plot of the film while reviewing it, but suffice it to say that there are some heart-rending plot developments which enhance the emotional impact of the film. However, as someone who has recently visited India the scenes in the movie which take place in India, particularly at the Taj Mahal are incredibly beautiful and meaningful.

The acting, especially by Kal Penn (Gogol Ganguli), Irrfan Khan (Ashoke Ganguli) and Tabu (Ashima Ganguli) is excellent, and Mira Nair's direction is noticeably effective, except for a peculiar sequence that appears whenever the principals are in the airport flying from the U.S. to India. Another captivating aspect of the movie is the music, supervised by Nitin Sawhney, which features some amazing traditional vocal stylings that both begins and ends the film.

GRADE: A.