The Namesake

Ok I told myself I will not do another review for a while. but there !

Namesake - Mira Nair.. Lazy saturday evening, SFO

I always have high expectations from movie adaptation of good books, at least for that brief moment when i am waiting outside a theatre. Although on a lazy evening in mood for an intellectual debate and with a drink in hand, if you asked me if I ever have great expectations from novel inspired movies. I would most definitely say no. But I guess its mostly coz I want to see a good adaptation but we seldom get to see one. Very very rarely.

The problem also with a visual medium like a movie is that its very limiting. All you can perceive or imagine is limited to that screen you see in front of you. The very magic of books lies in that undefined imagination territory that it dwells in. A scene is described in detail from an acute perspective of the writer but when you read it, its not just the details that draw that picture but there are too many bits of your own imagination when that scene plays in your head. I am willing to bet that if you take the same paragraph from a book and ask 2 people to describe it, they will probably start with the same canvas but the colors and shapes will most definitely differ. (I also think one of the reasons why many people do not indulge in reading is because of a certain lack of that visual imagination capability)

Having said that, sometimes a genre like fantasy or sci-fi probably has a greater success rate simply because they are very suggestive (and I did not intend to trivialize the art and technology involved, i take that as a given). And the visual suggestions of that nature are better welcomed by our minds rather than the depiction of a mundane suburban household. We do not give much importance to how close to life that street scene looks or that school scene looks. But we are definitely captured by yoda's and marvin's and gollum's. We may have imagined a fictional characters like the ones stated above but to see a representation on the screen ! Oh so very nice.. And from there on, the characters are etched in our minds as we saw them on celluloid. Its image selling at its best!

Anyways, coming back to a general book adaptation, I think a director or a screenplay writer's worst nightmare is having to shrink those 500-900 pages into a 2 hours format. And how well the movie is received is very highly dependent on that. Many may argue and say its about the performances, its about the direction blah blah. But I believe that if your end canvas is shoddy or incomplete, you are only setting yourself up for a failure.

Namesake by Mira Nair is an ambitious effort by the lady and she almost succeeds too. When you see the credits in the begining, english merging with bengali gives you that warm fuzzy feeling. And I am sure it gave Jhumpa Lahiri that feeling too. A certain sense of comfort in knowing that yes, the child aka my book will be taken care of.

Tabu for starters, is classic! Man, she is one underrated actress in bollywood. Incidently I saw 'Iruvar' yesterday and much to my dismay I never knew Tabu had acted in it! I just could not believe I did not know that. Of course I had never seen the movie completely but thats no excuse !

In namesake, she is not tabu, she is Ashima from begining to end. It is so nice to see an actress who can slip into a character so effortlessly and not to mention look so pretty doing it :) Ashima is the backbone on the story, the movie starts and ends with her. You seen her transformation as an simple and intelligent girl from calcutta to a very independent and intelligent woman returning home to calcutta. The impish nature of the character is extremely endearing.

Irfan Khan is also outstanding. What a performance, i mean so brilliant. Its so difficult to play a role where you don't distract the audience but at the same time, make a mark.

Kal Penn, I thought was quite well suited for the character. But sadly for him, he comes with a lot of media baggage. I am glad that he decided to break away from that funny american indian sterotype but somehow the hangover of that still shows in so many scenes. Maybe, just maybe because we have quite a wisecrack picture of him in our minds that we are not convinced during scenes where he is required to cry or portray that imminent gloom. It just does not look convincing enough. But like I said, he needs to do more roles that get him out of the stereotype, has a lot of potential.

Jacinda Barett, very pretty and very wasted in this movie..

Zuleikha Robinson, now that one was a pleasant surprise, I was always very curious to find out who would play that role in the movie. Very very sexy.

When i was reading the book, I have to say the final 50 pages are distracting and somewhere towards the end you are torn between deciding who is the focal point of the book? Is it really the namesake Gogol or is it Ashima whose character is the only one the author has painstakingly progressed developing against all odds. And the same confusion comes across in the movie. The movie begins and ends with Ashima but obviously she is not the namesake.

Also, no matter how you twist and turn the character of Gogol, there is nothing creative that comes out of it. If Mira had stretched it even a bit more, she would have bordered on being preachy about indian roots and culture and what not.
I think it was an intelligent decision to keep it limited to the intellectual and emotional growth and journey of Ashima with the so called coming of age of Gogol.

But having said that if I have one nit to pick with Mira Nair and Sooni Taraporevala, its about how little of Ashima's initial foray into the new country is shown. That so sad because thats where the book wins hands down, thats the first half of the book thats so endearing that you just cannot put it down. Even the small scene where she makes jhal muri out of Rice crispies is not forceful enough. When that scene was playing, I could hear giggles from the audience but believe me, these were people who had read the book and recognized the subtle pain of homesickness. For the uninitiated, it was just another scene. And there are many incidents like that for the young Ashima in an unknown country.
I think Mira lost out a bit somewhere by not incorporating that in the movie.

But there is so much sensitivity in the movie that I can proudly say only a woman can bring across. There are scenes where you will have that sneaky smile and there are definitely a couple of scenes where you will reach out for that kleenex.

Bottomline, a really nice movie but please watch it after reading the book and also watchable only without any preconceived bias.