Movie Review: The Namesake

The Film

Namesake is a mediocre film by Mira Nair and based on an equally middling novel by Pulitzer Prize winning London born author of Indian descent, Jhumpa Lahiri. It is a coming of age story of an ABCD, Gogol Ganguli, by "another badly confused Deshi" (ABCD), Lahiri.

The novel traces the story of Gogol Ganguli, son of first generation Indian immigrants - Ashoke and Ashima – presented in the movie as cardboard characters, whose one-dimensional struggles superfluously adorn the movie –and his struggle to come to terms with his cross-cultural identity. Gogol goes through various expected phases of someone shooing away a psychological ghost - unexpressed anger, rebelliousness, and then rapprochement that comes at the behest of his father's unexpected death and later through his wife's infidelity. While the issues are real, they seem to have been frozen and then perfunctorily staked over by an inane screenplay by Nair's usual collaborator - her Harvard peer Sooni Taporevala. It appears that by trying to cram in too much – a bi-generational story - it is not able to do any of the stories justice.

Samosas, Rasogullas, and Indian Relatives
Nair captures the perversities of an immigrant's life with great humor and great eye for detail. We get to sit in the endless uncle-aunty parties full of Bengali food, and watch as our little ABCDs squirm when talked to by the way 'uncool' uncle and aunties. We get to see how the American raised children take in the soot laden, chaotic Indian cities and the clinging relatives on their visits to India. Of course the Indian relatives themselves remain caricatures of humans.

Gogol wants his overcoat back
Gogol's overcoat has been done a disservice. Much like the name of Virgnia Woolf was expropriated by the mediocre and unrelated epoynomous play, "Who is afraid of Virgina Woolf?", Lahiri leans on the exoticness of Gogol to rescue her. Lahiri doesn't have the intellectual depth to even throw in a line about why Russian authors were popular in India. Gogol's deeply ironical and existentialist short story Overcoat becomes a peg on which Lahiri tries to hang 'the namesake', Gogol Ganguli's pretentious superfluous problems.

Article Author: Spincycle

Spincycle is interested in questions around media, governance, and political economy. He strongly values reading good fiction for he feels that it imparts the important value of empathy.

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