The Namesake: Movie Review

The Namesake (2006): ***

Catching a movie at a film festival has an undying charm. And almost all of it comes from the fact that you see the film months before its official release. So here I am–fresh from the screening of Mira Nair’s The Namesake feeling relatively smug of having watched it atleast half a year ahead of the general public world over.

Now Namesake the book (by Jhumpa Lahiri) and me go back a few years when I was binge-reading Indian fiction in English day and night. Freshly disappointed with the author’s ticket-to-fame Interpreter of Maladies, and in awe of authors like Rohinton Mistry and Vikram Seth who had the penchant to weave the most complex of stories into well-defined and emotionally well-pronounced old-world epics, The Namesake’s laid back, sensory-concentration didn’t evoke a sort of must-read-it vibe and I remember placing it on the bookshelf after reading some 50-60 pages. 2 years on, and just a few weeks back I picked it off my shelf on a whim and was totally amazed by how easily and beautifully, Lahiri shaped her characters. There was also this it-couldn’t-have-been-said-better feel and the sheer power of emotion between the lines that just had me hooked. And the undercurrent of a deeply felt uprootedness is something every NRI worth his salt would identify with.

The dilemma this time around was, I had already booked the tickets for the film playing at the British Film Festival, was dead curious to see what magic thespians like Tabu (who I have sorely missed after Meenaxi and Maqbool almost 3 years back) and Irrfan Khan would create together under the reins of Mira Nair and what Mira Nair, whose sheer honesty and unmanipulative warmth as a film-maker I had become quite a fan of after watching Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding and Kama Sutra would handle a book as subtle as The Namesake. So, to do justice to my film-watching experience and for once get an objective view of a book-based film, I reluctantly sacrificed reading the book once again after 70 or so pages. Do I regret it? Well, after watching the film, I have to say yes, a bit.

I wouldn’t hyper-intellectualise why the film doesn’t really work in totality for the faults are pretty basic. Given the epic scope of the novel which spans over a weighty 3 decades or so, to stuff all that in a 120 minute screenplay is a tough job. Especially when the film chronicles a family’s journey over two generations, having a high emotional quotient in drama and conflict go a long way in making it memorable. But here, with every successive hopping-years-in-a-single-silent-cut, the viewer slowly feels more and more distanced from the film’s characters until there comes a point when you feel too much has been left out, too much is cut rather too soon, and too much is happening too soon in a screenplay that gets jumpier with every passing minute. Just when you start becoming comfortable with a point in timeline of the lives within the Ganguli household, you are pushed further along. Its like being in an over-crowded museum where everything is so beautiful, you want to stare at it a few more seconds if only the person behind you would stop sighing so loudly, making you to do the decent thing and move to the next equally beautiful sight.

The compliment in the last sentence is for the whole cast each of whom turn in such endearing performances that you can’t get enough of them. Give her the slightest of lines and she’ll still shine the brightest. That’s Tabu for you. Filled with everyday nuances (watch her mix red-chilli powder, salted peanuts to rice crispies for breakfast or watch her glances as her boy’s girlfriend addresses her and her husband by first names), she fills Ashima Ganguli with so much life in her own lethargic, lived-in way, it takes a single scene to warm up to this constantly bewildered character. I actually loved the subtle transition that Tabu so brilliantly plays in Ashima on her trip back to Calcutta where an otherwise sober parent in her turns into such a bubbling uninhibited livewire that even her phoren-born-and-bred daughter is embarassed when her mother playfully poses atop a rickshaw. The actress totally looks the part too. From exuding timeless charm in her 20s as a reluctant Bengali girl with beautiful long hair and petite profile to radiating pure, maternal warmth (replete with dark circles, greying hair, tired eyes, decently draped saris)–its a transition that gives the film much of its humour, graph and soul.

Matching Tabu step for step is Irrfan Khan as Ashoke, who with his everyman face literally sleepwalks through a chokingly sympathetic sketch with life-like geniality. Kal Penn is another inspired piece of casting who not only triumphs in his now-signature straight face comedy but is pretty effective with the otherwise grossly underwritten dramatic portions which bring out the angst and infuse life-affirming lessons in Gogol Ganguli. The trio alongwith Sahira Nair paint a believable picture of a family that could have easily done with more screen time together.

If only the screenplay had stuck to one timeline from the start and used the rest as flashbacks, we would have so many more scenes of these characters seeking out to each other which really would have turned the movie into a real-life dramedy on par with any of Mike Leigh’s works. As of now it resembles a watered down Baghban (the emotional peaks are missing) meets a watered down East is East (the humour is more subtle) with shades of watered down Pardes (the loneliness and the resulting melancholia amidst the elder members of the Indian diaspora begged for more sequences).

And even though my references might raise an eyebrow or two, the fact remains that the genre this movie is in (that of a family drama) its surprisingly quite wishy washy in everything it attempts to address–the loneliness of a newlywed couple in foreign waters, their struggle to carve out a home and raise a family amidst the culture shock, the differences in perceptions and in opinions that ensue amidst the parents and their kids leading to the alienation of the former and finally the growing up and owning up phase where there’s acceptance and respect for one’s identity, roots and family (symbolically embodied in Nikhil Ganguli’s namesake–Gogol). All with splendid scope for drama which somehow remains unrealised thanks partly to the aforementioned snap-cut approach taken in the screenplay which robs the film of a natural flow and the jokey tone that the film-maker prefers and relies on so heavily that when things get serious, the film’s ill-at-ease with loud display of emotions and subtlety soon becomes a justifiable blandness. Yes, the humour almost always works but a story as epic as this needed an equal conviction to the serious parts. As it stands, it is poignant, but only in places. The background score is also quite ordinary and because the movie is so brutally edited, one’s interest starts to waver towards the last half an hour or so making it seem longer than it is.

So that’s about it. The Namesake is a movie I definitely did not absolutely regret spending £15 on (that’s the most I have spent on a movie without owning it). The fact that it feels incomplete despite hearfelt performances from the ensemble has only made me more determined to read the book and get a bigger slice of the Gangulis’ life. And reading it again with such good actors in mind will definitely be entertaining. If hypothetically, the book turns out to be as truncated as the movie, then I’d concur that maybe the story just wasn’t meant for the big screen. But I’d have to reserve that judgement until I read the book (which I hope to complete and review sometime very soon). Till then I hope Mira Nair has shot more of this movie for every extra scene we didn’t get to see today will only add more flesh and blood to the well-enacted characters and a heart-rending story that pays a sweet tribute to parenthood and family.

The trailer for those keen on the movie: