The Namesake Release Date: March 9, 2007 Starring: Kal Penn, Zuleikha Robinson, Irrfan Khan, Tabu, Jacinda Barrett Directed by: Mira Nair
GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 2/16/07)
In a most welcome rebound — after her lively, colorful, and largely insufferable version of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, director Mira Nair tackles another literary adaptation — this time of a contemporary best-seller by Jhumpa Lahiri — and makes her best film yet. The Namesake is a thoroughly engaging, terrifically moving family story that's rich in beautifully observed and lovingly conveyed human detail. It begins with Ashoke Ganguli (Irrfan Khan), on a train in India, explaining to a fellow passenger why he's reading the stories of Nikolai Gogol, and ends with Ashoke's son (Kal Penn) — the namesake of the title, who has been named Gogol, for reasons that are clarified as the story spans a generation — finally reading Gogol's The Overcoat. "We all came out of Gogol's overcoat," Ashoke is fond of quoting Dostoevsky, and one of the many nice things about Nair's movie, which goes from the arranged marriage of Ashoke and Ashima (Tabu) to their lonely early days in America to the uneasy assimilation of their children and beyond, is that it will make you understand what Ashoke means even if you don't know Gogol from Google. As for the details, they are abundant from the very beginning, as in an unforgettable moment when Ashima, about to meet her husband-to-be for the first time, sees his shoes on a mat outside the room and, bedazzled by the "Made in America" engraved on their insoles, slyly and shyly steps into them, feeling them out. The lovely Tabu makes the moment palpable for the viewer. All of the performances in the movie are spectacular, but Penn's transformation from petulant teen to smoothed-out, capable, but still self-absorbed adult could be one of the year's finest pieces of acting. The story line becomes a little diffuse during the film's last 30 minutes, but Nair's deft handling of people and places (she shoots South Asia and the suburban northeast of the United States with the same knowingness) creates a cumulative warmth, making one loath to leave the Ganguli family once the movie's over.
