A young Bengali woman enters into an arranged marriage, moves to America to be with her husband, and learns to love him. A Bengali couple living in America tries to raise their little boy according to the traditional values of their homeland, but by kindergarten, he has become so Americanized that he rejects those values as old-fashioned and foreign. An American teenager is embarrassed by his Bengali heritage, but learns to connect with it on a family trip to India. A college student shocks his Bengali immigrant parents by dating a white woman. A shy, nerdy teenager moves to Paris and becomes an accomplished seductress. A seemingly perfect marriage ends when the wife leaves her husband for a French ex-lover. After the death of her husband, a Bengali immigrant moves from America back to India to re-start her life and pursue the dream she put on hold in order to be wife and mother. Each of these plot lines is enough for a single movie. However, "The Namesake" tries to fit all of these plots together into a single film, leaving this viewer unsatisfied.
Irfan Khan plays Ashoke Ganguli, an intellectual with a fascination with the short story "The Umbrella" by Nikolai Gogol. In 1977--after a near-fatal train wreck--he enters into an arranged marriage with Ashima, a beautiful young woman with aspirations of being a professional sitar player. They move to the suburbs of New York for Ashoke's job as a college professor. Eventually they have a son, who they name "Gogol" in honor of Ashoke's favorite writer. They want to follow the Bengali tradition of changing the child's name when he is old enough for school, but little Gogol rebels because none of his other classmates changed their names.
We then fast-forward to the 1990's. A teen-aged, pot-smoking Gogol (Kal Penn) is embarrassed by his parents' old-fashioned immigrant ways, and by the name Gogol. At first, the other kids tease him because "Gogol Ganguli" sounds silly to western ears, but when the English teacher lectures the class on Nikolai Gogol's personal life, his classmates start razzing him about how his father named him for a freak. He is worried that he will never have a normal love life by western standards, but will have to enter into an arranged marriage with a Bengali girl. Unfortunately, the only Bengali girls he knows are his sister Sonia (Sahira Nair), and a bespectacled brace-face named Moushoumi (Zuleikha Robinson) who is even more of a social misfit than he is. An emergency in Ashima's family takes the Gangulis back to Calcutta. At first Gogol hates it, and the locals don't understand his habit of running for physical fitness. But while they are there, the family decides to visit the Taj Mahal, where Gogol is inspired to become an architect and assents to letting his parents change his name to "Nikhil".
We fast-forward a few more years to show Nik--as he now calls himself--in grad school and engaged to Maxine (Jacinda Barrett), a stunning blonde who comes from old money. Her parents love him, but he is reluctant to introduce her to his parents as he is still somewhat embarrassed by what he considers their backwards, old-world ways. After much prodding, he introduces Maxine to his parents and it is a complete bust. She wants to be respectful, but she comes across as condescending. They try meeting a few more times, but it never gets any less awkward. And when she makes the fatal error of wearing a black dress to a Hindu funeral (one is supposed to wear white), Nik realizes she will never truly understand him or his family.
The final act is set in the present day. Nik is now a successful professional. As a favor to his parents, he meets Moushoumi--the girl he wouldn't date in high school--for lunch and finds that she has grown into a sophisticated beauty. She regales him with stories of her former life in Paris and the many affairs she had while she was there. Eventually, she manages to seduce him and he falls in love. The couple's families are ecstatic because this is the marriage they wanted to arrange in the first place, and so they have a traditional Hindu ceremony. The marriage is short-lived however, since it turns out Moushoumi never quite broke things off with one of her Parisian suitors.
Given the inordinate length of the above plot summary, you might think this is a butt-numbingly long film. But, as with her ill-conceived adaptation of "Vanity Fair", director Mira Nair unwisely tries to cram a 30-year family epic into a little more than two hours. This not only leads to a disjointed narrative without much focus, but it leaves little room for the development of the supporting characters. We learn all about the marriage of Ashoke and Ashima and the neuroses and love life of their son Gogol, but daughter Sonia is virtually ignored, and we never really get to know Maxine or Moushoumi.
There are good things about this movie too. Mira Nair's storytelling may be wanting, but she has a keen eye and any frame from the film would make a beautiful photograph by itself. It is also interesting to see Hindu culture portrayed for a western audience without pandering. In a scene at the end when Gogol showed up for Ashoke's funeral with a pierced nose and a shaved head, many in the audience laughed when his mother was so moved because he was finally following the proper custom. And the honeymoon scene between Gogol and Moushoumi is a clever parody of Bollywood conventions where the lovers are not even allowed a chaste kiss on screen, so the climactic love scene shows them dancing about a foot apart.
Overall, however, because of the lack of a single coherent plot and the condensed feel of the movie, I give it a 6 out of 10.
Irfan Khan plays Ashoke Ganguli, an intellectual with a fascination with the short story "The Umbrella" by Nikolai Gogol. In 1977--after a near-fatal train wreck--he enters into an arranged marriage with Ashima, a beautiful young woman with aspirations of being a professional sitar player. They move to the suburbs of New York for Ashoke's job as a college professor. Eventually they have a son, who they name "Gogol" in honor of Ashoke's favorite writer. They want to follow the Bengali tradition of changing the child's name when he is old enough for school, but little Gogol rebels because none of his other classmates changed their names.
We then fast-forward to the 1990's. A teen-aged, pot-smoking Gogol (Kal Penn) is embarrassed by his parents' old-fashioned immigrant ways, and by the name Gogol. At first, the other kids tease him because "Gogol Ganguli" sounds silly to western ears, but when the English teacher lectures the class on Nikolai Gogol's personal life, his classmates start razzing him about how his father named him for a freak. He is worried that he will never have a normal love life by western standards, but will have to enter into an arranged marriage with a Bengali girl. Unfortunately, the only Bengali girls he knows are his sister Sonia (Sahira Nair), and a bespectacled brace-face named Moushoumi (Zuleikha Robinson) who is even more of a social misfit than he is. An emergency in Ashima's family takes the Gangulis back to Calcutta. At first Gogol hates it, and the locals don't understand his habit of running for physical fitness. But while they are there, the family decides to visit the Taj Mahal, where Gogol is inspired to become an architect and assents to letting his parents change his name to "Nikhil".
We fast-forward a few more years to show Nik--as he now calls himself--in grad school and engaged to Maxine (Jacinda Barrett), a stunning blonde who comes from old money. Her parents love him, but he is reluctant to introduce her to his parents as he is still somewhat embarrassed by what he considers their backwards, old-world ways. After much prodding, he introduces Maxine to his parents and it is a complete bust. She wants to be respectful, but she comes across as condescending. They try meeting a few more times, but it never gets any less awkward. And when she makes the fatal error of wearing a black dress to a Hindu funeral (one is supposed to wear white), Nik realizes she will never truly understand him or his family.
The final act is set in the present day. Nik is now a successful professional. As a favor to his parents, he meets Moushoumi--the girl he wouldn't date in high school--for lunch and finds that she has grown into a sophisticated beauty. She regales him with stories of her former life in Paris and the many affairs she had while she was there. Eventually, she manages to seduce him and he falls in love. The couple's families are ecstatic because this is the marriage they wanted to arrange in the first place, and so they have a traditional Hindu ceremony. The marriage is short-lived however, since it turns out Moushoumi never quite broke things off with one of her Parisian suitors.
Given the inordinate length of the above plot summary, you might think this is a butt-numbingly long film. But, as with her ill-conceived adaptation of "Vanity Fair", director Mira Nair unwisely tries to cram a 30-year family epic into a little more than two hours. This not only leads to a disjointed narrative without much focus, but it leaves little room for the development of the supporting characters. We learn all about the marriage of Ashoke and Ashima and the neuroses and love life of their son Gogol, but daughter Sonia is virtually ignored, and we never really get to know Maxine or Moushoumi.
There are good things about this movie too. Mira Nair's storytelling may be wanting, but she has a keen eye and any frame from the film would make a beautiful photograph by itself. It is also interesting to see Hindu culture portrayed for a western audience without pandering. In a scene at the end when Gogol showed up for Ashoke's funeral with a pierced nose and a shaved head, many in the audience laughed when his mother was so moved because he was finally following the proper custom. And the honeymoon scene between Gogol and Moushoumi is a clever parody of Bollywood conventions where the lovers are not even allowed a chaste kiss on screen, so the climactic love scene shows them dancing about a foot apart.
Overall, however, because of the lack of a single coherent plot and the condensed feel of the movie, I give it a 6 out of 10.