The Namesake (film).

The film version of The Namesake felt like a mediocre adaptation of a great book. I can’t speak to whether the book on which it’s based, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, is great, but the movie aspired to a scope that it wasn’t able to reach. It’s a quality movie, but one that left me feeling like it had missed its target.

The story … well, that’s the problem. The story lacks a coherent center. It is the story of a family, or perhaps the story of a culture clash, but either way it suffers without a central character to anchor the plot. The movie’s first half or first two-thirds or so focus on Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, the husband and wife and eventually the parents of Gogol Ganguli (the namesake of the film’s title), who takes over as the movie’s center through its finish. We start with Ashoke nearly dying in a train wreck in India, then we’re presented with the arrangement of his marriage to Ashima, and then they’re married and arrive in the U.S., where he’s lived for a few years since the accident. The movie settles in to a sweet sequence on the early years of the Gangulis’ marriage, then suddenly their two children are teenagers, at which point Gogol’s unusual name becomes a key plot element.

The movie jumps too quickly to achieve the epic scope of a novel that is attempting to tell the story of the clash between Indian and American cultures through the example of a single family. At one point, the scene changes and we see Ashima talking to a co-worker. She utters two sentences, around fifteen words. The scene ends, we’re taken somewhere else, and we never return to the previous point. This can work in a movie that’s trying to evoke a frenetic feeling in the audience, but a movie of deep emotions and big themes shouldn’t be rushing from one plot point to the next.

As another example, take the film’s last third, where Gogol wants to change his name, has a white girlfriend (the worst-drawn character in the film – about as three-dimensional as a piece of paper), then marries a Bengali girl in a 180-degree reversion to his roots, and then sees that marriage end in one of the less believable relationship-ending conversations you’ll see. (At the risk of spoiling something, let’s just say that Gogol must be telepathic to figure out his wife’s secret from the one verbal slip.) Gogol’s life alone, including his journey from assimilated American teen to proud son of Indian immigrants to one-foot-in-each-world yuppie to his uncertain future would fill a two-hour movie without any trouble. Squeezed into forty minutes, it feels cursory and unsatisfying.

I’m underselling the movie by focusing on this treatment of a rich plot. Ambition in a movie plot is a good thing, and the fact that they couldn’t fulfill the story’s promise is a minor criticism as opposed to the criticism I have of most movies, which is that their plots couldn’t fill a thimble to the halfway mark. The acting by all three of the leads in The Namesake is outstanding; Kal Penn’s performance will add yet another nail in the coffin that House is very slowly building itself, as I’ll have a hard time taking him seriously as a goofball. (Yes, I know he played Kumar, but that’s not exactly in my Netflix queue.) Some of the scenes shot in India are gorgeous; the costume design in the two Indian weddings is outstanding; and I thought the (almost) wordless scene between Gogol and his bride on their wedding night was really well done, a strong piece of writing that took its cue from how people actually interact with each other. The Namesake is absolutely worth renting; I’m just lamenting the movie it could have been instead.

Comments

  1. Christian Pieper

    I had a problem with the makeup in the movie. The age progression in Gogol’s parents wasn’t believable and it obscured my sense of the film’s time. Also, do people really care this much about their names? I know it represents something bigger in the movie, but Gogol is actually a pretty chill name.

  2. “Kal Penn’s performance will add yet another nail in the coffin that House is very slowly building itself, as I’ll have a hard time taking him seriously as a goofball.”

    I’m truly uncertain what you mean here. Whose coffin is House building? Kal Penn’s, or one for itself? Is Penn good in the movie, and so you have trouble taking him in comic roles? Or is he unbelievable because he’s goofy?

  3. i think the fault of the movie is that the book encompasses so many years (two entire generations, almost) that its difficult to whittle it down into a less than two hour movie. with that in mind, i thought the namesake was a great attempt at capturing a lot of lahiri’s essence.

    RE: christian’s comment – yes, people do care about their names, esp when they are kids and they arent named john or james. kids are lethal when youre a little different than the rest. but it also represents the link b/w the father and son, the link b/w india and america, the link b/w gogols childhood and adulthood.

  4. Keith, interesting post. I haven’t actually seen the movie, but I have read the book. Lahiri is a good author, and I’ve enjoyed some of her short stories, but the book just didn’t do it for me.

    I am a first generation Indian-American, so I thought that the central plot element, trying to bridge two vastly different cultures, while staying true to both, was inherently interesting. I, too, have a name that, while I like a lot now, I hated growing up (Malcolm isn’t really my name). The problem with the book is pretty similar to what Keith said about the movie: a muddled plot and some one-dimensional characters. You don’t really know that the book is about Gogol until well into the book, and the whole namesake thing, an Indian naming his son after a Russian author, just isn’t believable.

    Gogol’s white girlfriend is absolutely one-dimensional. And the books has the same faults as it seems Keith sees in the movie: irresolution. After the relationship with the white girl ends, all of a sudden a new chapter starts and she is completely missing from the narrative. Lazy writing, in my opinion.

    All that being said, I still think it was a worthwhile read. It’s a relatively short and fast read, and it is strong in the way that it depicts the struggles of trying to reconcile two cultures. Gogol’s character is believable, but to me it just seems that his actions fit too neatly into the story that Lahiri attemps to tell.

  5. I’ll be agreeing with Malcolm on his points about the novel version of the Namesake, but I’d just like to add that her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies is worth every second it takes to read, and in a way feels much more like a fully formed, mature book than the novel that followed it.

  6. Mike,

    I agree; that’s why I was disappointed by the novel.

  7. @TC

    I agree. I don’t know what that means either. As to Harold and Kumar, that was actually a decent movie with an underlying message on prevailing racial stereotypes in America. As a South Asian, I found it at least refreshing to see some of the more positive stereotypes…like we all want to be doctors (instead of say taxi drivers)!

  8. I think Keith means that the show House, at least for him, is becoming increasingly unwatchable, as he is going to have trouble watching someone who he has just seen give an excellent, nuanced performance somewhat waste his talents in the role of a goofy doctor. Hope I’m interpreting that right.

  9. Preston got the gist of it. I think House is having its worst season to date, and the knowledge that they’re wasting Kal Penn makes it even worse for me.

  10. I agree. While I love the show, they seem to have followed the plotline of picking the new team members a bit too far, which has begun to wear on me. Also, if they were getting a whole new team, why are we still being subjected to the old one?

  11. At least we know that the talents of one Kal Penn won’t be wasted on the upcoming art film ‘Harold & Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay’ — I’ve heard that Penn exhibits excellent range in the flick.

  12. jibraun: this is off topic, but imho theres no such thing as a positive stereotype. many asians at first may embrace the “model minority” stereotype but it too marginalizes a certain race/ethnicity, and what, if you’re asian and you dont fit the model minority, youre considered the yellow peril, a stereotype on the other end of the spectrum.

  13. sorry for the run-on sentence.

  14. Keith,

    I find the statement “I’ll have a hard time taking him seriously as a goofball” a bit of a stretch – I think one could take Jim Carrey seriously as a goofball after ‘The Truman Show’ Or Robin Williams in ‘Dead Poets Society’ or ‘Good Will Hunting’.

    Penn’s major roles from the past few years have been in “Epic Movie” (one of the worst movies of the last decade, maybe history), “Van Wilder 2: Rise of Taj”, and the new H&K film. It seems his goofball roles are the norm, not the exception.

    My point is: one great dramatic performance does not make a great dramatic actor.

    Thanks for the ‘Eastern Promises’ recommendation. Viggo earned his Oscar nod.

    – James

  15. Boring film that was worse with each succeeding minute. And his mother never aged… what the heck.