The Namesake
"The Namesake" has a deep, alluvial poetry to it, like a mighty river reaching the sea. It's mysterious and ordinary, insightful and banal, rambling and precise, and it is altogether unexpected. First novels generally don't make movies this fine, especially first novels that wander quietly through four decades of average people's lives. Where are the explosions? In the characters' hearts, it turns out.
Jhumpa Lahiri's much-praised 2003 bestseller was a gravely charming, closely observed saga of one immigrant Bengali family in America, with the focus on the American-born son and his search for identity. Director Mira Nair has taken the story and merged it with her own lush sensibilities and concerns. (She also relocates it from the Boston area to her familiar turf of Queens and suburban New York; our loss, but the movie's gain.)
The result is a lovely companion piece to Nair's 2001 art-house hit "Monsoon Wedding" -- more scattered but with a gathering profundity that lingers long after the lights come up. What do we bring to America when we come from other places, as almost all of us originally do? What do we give away in order to fit in? Can we get it back if we want, or does it change in the journey of assimilation? These are the questions "The Namesake" asks, and as vast as they are, Nair finds her answers in the smallest details of living.
There's nothing all that unusual, for instance, about Ashoke Ganguli (Irfan Khan ), a reedy, thoughtful young Indian academic in New York City in the late 1970s. He survived a train crash in his youth; he has a passion for 19th-century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol , but in most respects he's just another immigrant professional in a strange land, navigating this backslapping culture with caution.
Like many of his peers, too, he briefly returns to Calcutta for a bride. His arranged mate is Ashima (Tabu ), a dutiful daughter and gifted singer who clams up the moment she encounters the wintry wastes of Queens. Nair rushes through many of these early scenes, leaving out the images and observations Lahiri strews through her pages, but she keeps one defining moment: Before Ashima meets her future husband, she mischievously steps into his American-bought shoes outside her parent's door. It takes a certain kind of person to step across a planet and leave everything behind.
"The Namesake" eventually comes to ground in the alien landscape of Nyack, N.Y. , where the Gangulis move to raise their two children. And, again, there's nothing to distinguish their son from thousands of other ABCDs -- American-born Confused Desis. Except, perhaps, his name: Gogol. Bestowed in a pinch at the hospital, the name is a stopgap label that becomes an identity the toddler (Soham Chatterjee ) clings to when his parents try to change it to something more fittingly Indian.
Conversely, by the time Gogol grows up -- and is played by Kal Penn -- the name has become a mark of everything the young man hates about his parent's culture: all the strangeness and embarrassment. He goes to college under the more eloquent Nikhil, which his white girlfriends can easily shorten to Nick. He becomes an architect, moves to Manhattan; he blends. Isn't that the point? And if it isn't, what is?
Penn showed he's one of the sharpest comic minds of his generation in the randy stoner farce "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle ," and here he emerges as a dramatic actor of wit and consequence. The disgusted looks the teenage Gogol shoots his father have the proper mixture of arrogance and callowness, and in Nikhil's pilgrim's progress toward adulthood, Penn shows wisdom evolving in spite of the hero's best efforts to avoid it.
He respects Gogol's averageness, too. What might have been a blurry central figure becomes both specific and universal, deepened by the small ironies of life. Penn could turn out to be the Desi Tom Hanks. Scratch that -- he could be the next Tom Hanks, period.
Not all of Nair's nips and tucks benefit the story. As an American-born Bengali beauty of the sort Gogol's mother would approve of, Zuleikha Robinson is bewitching but more villainized than in the novel, where Lahiri could spend 30 pages getting sympathetically inside the character's head.
Jacinda Barrett ("The Last Kiss") is a washout as Nick's girlfriend Maxine, and she doesn't begin to suggest the breezy WASP entitlement that attracts and repels Gogol. After all, Ashoke tells his wife, this is a country where "professors dress worse than our pedicab drivers." One has to learn the rules of engagement before one can disengage from them.
But "The Namesake" is entertaining and alert, a production fully felt in a way that Nair's last movie, the misconceived Reese Witherspoon vehicle "Vanity Fair," only approximated. Frederick Elmes's camerawork captures the riot of colors in Calcutta, the sterility of the New World, and the slow return of hues to the Gangulis's newfound land. The score by the Asian Underground DJ Nitin Sawhney loops gracefully back and forth between two cultures, knitting them together.
The movie's governing metaphor is bridges, like the 59th Street Bridge in New York, like the Howrah Bridge in Calcutta, like Gogol himself, a human TriBoro linking India, America, and the Russia of his namesake. As in "Monsoon Wedding," Nair finds joy in rituals transposed, in thousand-year-old habits that die and are reborn on distant shores. The more Gogol knows, the more he understand s he needs to learn. "The Namesake," like its literary source, ends as the journey begins.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
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