The Namesake is an interesting movie. It is not a great movie, but it’s a good one. Adaptations of books into movies have never been easy, and rarely has it been done with as much sincerity as artists like Kubrick or Ray. Mira Nair does a commendable job with the task of showing alienated countrymen(country: India) in a foreign land, distant from customs, in short, generally unhappy and somewhat confused people.
Spoiler warning – plot details follow
The movie is the story of Ashoke, Ashima, and their son Gogol. Sonia, their daughter is present, but mostly as an accoutrement to the general storyline. Ashoke and Ashima are a Bengali couple who leave their country to raise their children in the US, away from their parents, away from the individuality of their own culture. Gogol is born American, and grows up to be American, just like his friends. It all starts with an arranged marriage in the heat and humidity of a Kolkata afternoon; it suddenly gets a little colder when he brings his new bride to a wintry Brooklyn. The marriage is arranged, and love grows post-marriage through mutually inclusive feelings of alienation and isolation. Gogol, named after the Russian author Nikolai Gogol, and as the very antithesis of his father, turns out to be the archetypal heavy-metal listener, who loves to get stoned with his friends. After completing high school, Gogol moves back to the city, where he hooks up with the American lady, Maxine, who he loves to call Max, much to the consternation of his parents, more specifically, his mother. Gogol, like most young people, thinks that his parents are an embarrassment, and as he makes the extra effort to fit into American society, and it’s numerous establishments, drifts far away from home, mentally and physically. A series of melodramatic events occur, and Gogol is broken and realizes his alienation from his family, when his father dies leaving his mother all alone. Gogol realizes that even after changing his name to Nikhil and living with his girlfriend, he is still painfully alienated from his own roots, just like his parents were from their own. A series of misunderstandings later, Gogol breaks up with Maxine, and agrees to his mother’s entreaties of meeting with the childhood family friend, Moushumi who used to detest American television, and used to read weird French stuff, a very interesting character that has now changed into a sultry and somewhat seductive individual. However, their blissful married life is one that is bound to fall apart, and as his marriage breaks, Ashima takes the fateful decision of getting back to India, and make one last attempt of getting back to her roots.
This, in essence is the storyline, which in the peculiarity that always distinguishes literature from movies, is more profound and much more enjoyable when one actually reads the book. The movie is a combination of evocative performances by the lead star-cast, though I constantly had the feeling that the dissociation of Penn as Gogol could have been a little more subdued, and somehow, I had the feeling that Mira didn’t try to get away from the typical Indian-living-abroad stereotype. Tabu and Irrfan Khan, expectedly, give wonderful performances, and the scenes of shy intimacy towards the beginning of their marriage are especially wonderful. But the narrative and screenplay left a lot to be desired, in some crucial moments, which is partly because; trying to fit in a story which spans over three decades into a two-hour movie is never an easy task.
What’s lovely about the movie is that, in sharp contrast to most movies that try to portray India and its idiosyncrasies and mostly fall flat on their face, this movie brims with intelligence, and performances which display different layers of sensitivity in the characters. Tabu’s performance as the Bengali housewife, and then the doting Bengali mother, and finally the confused widow, is one of the best acting jobs in 2006, a role that confirms her considerable acting skills like no other. Yes, it’s an eminently watchable film.
The film fails on three fronts – firstly, because Mira Nair, creative director that she is, fails to get away from the typical stereotypes of Indians living abroad and the general feeling of isolation which they feel in a strange foreign land. Although, the initial camerawork concentrating on the ice and the whiteness of the snow heightens the couple’s sense of isolation in the strange land beautifully, it’s a sentiment that’s been explored in some detail in several east-meets-west movies, and it was probably in this context that I expected a much more mature and somewhat subtler understanding of the psyche of Gogol as a confused child, confused between his innate Indian-ness and his surroundings. The second thing, as I have already mentioned, is that very few film-makers manage to compress three decades into two hours without making the film look like hurried tapestry of images; some linked beautifully, some a little haphazard, and some making little sense. Mira Nair does a commendable job, but at several points in the movie, the screenplay looks hurried, the shifts in location a little forced and somewhat disconcerting. The last is the forced inclusion of the bhatiyali song during the last rites of the departed Ashoke. As they scatter the ashes, there is a lonely boatman on the river singing the song. With all due respect to the director, it does impart certain pathos to the scene, and probably needs to be understood in the correct context, but somehow; I found it tough to amalgamate the song, the beautiful image of the boatman with the Howrah Bridge as the backdrop, and the basic sadness of the scene.
A footnote: Kolkata has been portrayed in several ways by different directors. While Ray’s Kolkata was a city which he loved and lived in, a city which breathed along with him, Mira Nair’s Kolkata, although achingly beautiful in its splendor and its squalor, is a city which she looks at through a tinted glass, probably with wide-open eyes, but not a city that she loves.