I have heard of 'Bollywood' for years. I even read a great detective novel once years ago set in and around the movie sets and business and was a page-turner and I thought 'what a great movie this would make!' Alas, in the late afternoon after seeing a great Indian/American movie, sitting in an Irish bar in Chicago drinking a Corona on 'Mexican Night' in as American a setting as is possible, I can't recall the novel's title.
Van Morrison in the background and TVs glowing with a silent Sports center, an Irish bartender popping by and asking what I am writing about and we talk of how recent movies have done more to integrate the new immigrant experience than any PC news stories or forced curricula or multicultural faces on the nine o'clock new team. 'Lone Star' made the Mexican illegal immigrant story all of our stories. 'In America' reacquainted us all to the Irish experience and how wonderful America really is amid the constant barrage of what is wrong what needs to be apologized for in an orgy of self-loathing, and how human that menacing black guy is who lives across the hall and seems so threatening.
Movies do that, great movies do that and now with 'The Namesake' we have can come to understand the Indian immigrant experience in a way nothing else could. Its exuberance is Bollywood, its story is Hollywood.
It tells the story of a family, of a father and mother and their children and their faith in America and you wait for cynicism, you wait for the rubbing of our noses in the innate racism of America that we all know is there because every movie and TV show tells us that that is the reality of America, and it doesn't happen. The people in this movie are people, no over dramatization, not a false move or emotion, one scene among hundreds a bit off, several scenes so on that one can't hide the tears.
I realized after becoming a father that the tragedy of life is not that we die and that we know we must die, but that we have to grow old to watch our children grow up. If we could just freeze time in our early thirties when our kids are four or five and not have to be fifty to see them becoming adults and in our sixties to watch them marry and have children, life would not be so cruel. In 'The Namesake' a traditional arranged Bengali marriage becomes a loving pairing for life. A son is born and in the face of American bureaucracy is named 'Gogol' after the Russian author. Much later he is given his traditional Indian name but with the coming of first grade claims his American, by way of 19th century Russia, name and sets into motion the delicate, beautiful unfolding of why the movie is called 'The Namesake.' A daughter, children growing up, the parents slowly graying, America hugs their children to its bosom and makes them unrecognizable to the parents. The family returns to India for a visit when the kids are at their most high school cynical and we go to as companions and look at India with the Indian American teenagers and wish we to somehow had such an interesting family and such a rich heritage.
Then Gogol reaches adulthood and takes his Indian name. He and his sister fall in love with others with mixed results, a marriage happens, Indian customs and American freedom, careers and decisions. All true to the characters, true to situation of immigrants. Heartbreak, business success, the death of relatives unseen for years in India, the reality for so many immigrants that their new lives take them away from their old lives forever. The viewer soaks it all up, as a gentle rain, unforced, universal, lovely, brimming with humanity.
I was in a elevator today with an older Indian gentleman, very much like the father in the movie, scuffed shoes, but of quality, suit, tie, a formality in bearing, thousands of miles from Bengal, thousands of miles from Delhi, from a two thousand year old culture living in a two hundred year old one I wanted to ask him if he had seen the movie. I didn't. I could not break the silence of an elevator. But, I knew him. I think I knew him.
The movie meanders. It happens. You don't feel a plot. You feel life. At the end a scene is replayed, a memory remembered. I got tears in my eyes. The young father with his young son at a beach on a cold cloudy day. The boy's hand safely in his father's. The father realizing that he had forgotten the camera but wanting to have something to make sure that his son, as a man remembered being there, being there with his father, being a child with his hand so safe in his father's hand, and his father bending over and saying 'Gogol, remember this.' And, he does.
Van Morrison in the background and TVs glowing with a silent Sports center, an Irish bartender popping by and asking what I am writing about and we talk of how recent movies have done more to integrate the new immigrant experience than any PC news stories or forced curricula or multicultural faces on the nine o'clock new team. 'Lone Star' made the Mexican illegal immigrant story all of our stories. 'In America' reacquainted us all to the Irish experience and how wonderful America really is amid the constant barrage of what is wrong what needs to be apologized for in an orgy of self-loathing, and how human that menacing black guy is who lives across the hall and seems so threatening.
Movies do that, great movies do that and now with 'The Namesake' we have can come to understand the Indian immigrant experience in a way nothing else could. Its exuberance is Bollywood, its story is Hollywood.
It tells the story of a family, of a father and mother and their children and their faith in America and you wait for cynicism, you wait for the rubbing of our noses in the innate racism of America that we all know is there because every movie and TV show tells us that that is the reality of America, and it doesn't happen. The people in this movie are people, no over dramatization, not a false move or emotion, one scene among hundreds a bit off, several scenes so on that one can't hide the tears.
I realized after becoming a father that the tragedy of life is not that we die and that we know we must die, but that we have to grow old to watch our children grow up. If we could just freeze time in our early thirties when our kids are four or five and not have to be fifty to see them becoming adults and in our sixties to watch them marry and have children, life would not be so cruel. In 'The Namesake' a traditional arranged Bengali marriage becomes a loving pairing for life. A son is born and in the face of American bureaucracy is named 'Gogol' after the Russian author. Much later he is given his traditional Indian name but with the coming of first grade claims his American, by way of 19th century Russia, name and sets into motion the delicate, beautiful unfolding of why the movie is called 'The Namesake.' A daughter, children growing up, the parents slowly graying, America hugs their children to its bosom and makes them unrecognizable to the parents. The family returns to India for a visit when the kids are at their most high school cynical and we go to as companions and look at India with the Indian American teenagers and wish we to somehow had such an interesting family and such a rich heritage.
Then Gogol reaches adulthood and takes his Indian name. He and his sister fall in love with others with mixed results, a marriage happens, Indian customs and American freedom, careers and decisions. All true to the characters, true to situation of immigrants. Heartbreak, business success, the death of relatives unseen for years in India, the reality for so many immigrants that their new lives take them away from their old lives forever. The viewer soaks it all up, as a gentle rain, unforced, universal, lovely, brimming with humanity.
I was in a elevator today with an older Indian gentleman, very much like the father in the movie, scuffed shoes, but of quality, suit, tie, a formality in bearing, thousands of miles from Bengal, thousands of miles from Delhi, from a two thousand year old culture living in a two hundred year old one I wanted to ask him if he had seen the movie. I didn't. I could not break the silence of an elevator. But, I knew him. I think I knew him.
The movie meanders. It happens. You don't feel a plot. You feel life. At the end a scene is replayed, a memory remembered. I got tears in my eyes. The young father with his young son at a beach on a cold cloudy day. The boy's hand safely in his father's. The father realizing that he had forgotten the camera but wanting to have something to make sure that his son, as a man remembered being there, being there with his father, being a child with his hand so safe in his father's hand, and his father bending over and saying 'Gogol, remember this.' And, he does.