The Namesake
-
Sonic Youth
- Tenured Laureate
- Posts: 8005
- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 8:35 pm
- Location: USA
The Namesake
Allan Hunter in Toronto
Screendaily
Dir: Mira Nair. USA. 2006. 122mins
Mira Nair’s best films have shown an optimism about life and an affection for the flaws and failings of her characters, and she brings a similar sense of compassion to The Namesake, her adaptation of the novel by Pulitzer prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri. A sweeping saga of culture clashes and the tensions between the generations, it steers a confident course through a mass of incident, staying the right side of excessive sentimentality and superficiality to emerge as a truly warm-hearted portrait of an Indian/America family and its many travails.
Commercial returns should easily match those achieved by Monsoon Wedding (2001), while the American setting and partial American cast should only enhance its status in the US as a sturdy arthouse prospect for older, sophisticated audiences....
...Nair was surprisingly heavy handed in her approach to the screen version of the Thackeray classic Vanity Fair (2004), but here she seems much more at ease with a literary adaptation that has some of the sweep of a great read without becoming a mere record of hatches, matches and dispatches.
An admirer of Satyajit Ray, she is clearly also a film-maker in the tradition of Jean Renoir, never judging her characters but merely gathering them into a warm embrace and trying to make us understand that they all have their reasons for what they do. Ashoke has the wisdom to know that in time his son will understand not only the reasons for his odd name but why his father came to New York. Ashima is a loyal wife, but we also gain a sense of her loneliness and what she has sacrificed for her family.
The one character who is rather poorly treated is that of Max, whose blithe insensitivity towards the Ganguli family provides some easy laughs but does not seem entirely in keeping with such an educated, caring woman.
Best known for his comic escapades in Van Wilder: Party Liaison (2002) and Harold And Kumar (2004), Kal Penn rises to the challenge of his most demanding dramatic role yet. He makes a convincing journey from frustrated, rebellious adolescent to mature, thoughtful adult. His performance is the solid backbone of an appealing and civilised production.
Allan Hunter in Toronto
Screendaily
Dir: Mira Nair. USA. 2006. 122mins
Mira Nair’s best films have shown an optimism about life and an affection for the flaws and failings of her characters, and she brings a similar sense of compassion to The Namesake, her adaptation of the novel by Pulitzer prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri. A sweeping saga of culture clashes and the tensions between the generations, it steers a confident course through a mass of incident, staying the right side of excessive sentimentality and superficiality to emerge as a truly warm-hearted portrait of an Indian/America family and its many travails.
Commercial returns should easily match those achieved by Monsoon Wedding (2001), while the American setting and partial American cast should only enhance its status in the US as a sturdy arthouse prospect for older, sophisticated audiences....
...Nair was surprisingly heavy handed in her approach to the screen version of the Thackeray classic Vanity Fair (2004), but here she seems much more at ease with a literary adaptation that has some of the sweep of a great read without becoming a mere record of hatches, matches and dispatches.
An admirer of Satyajit Ray, she is clearly also a film-maker in the tradition of Jean Renoir, never judging her characters but merely gathering them into a warm embrace and trying to make us understand that they all have their reasons for what they do. Ashoke has the wisdom to know that in time his son will understand not only the reasons for his odd name but why his father came to New York. Ashima is a loyal wife, but we also gain a sense of her loneliness and what she has sacrificed for her family.
The one character who is rather poorly treated is that of Max, whose blithe insensitivity towards the Ganguli family provides some easy laughs but does not seem entirely in keeping with such an educated, caring woman.
Best known for his comic escapades in Van Wilder: Party Liaison (2002) and Harold And Kumar (2004), Kal Penn rises to the challenge of his most demanding dramatic role yet. He makes a convincing journey from frustrated, rebellious adolescent to mature, thoughtful adult. His performance is the solid backbone of an appealing and civilised production.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
-
Sonic Youth
- Tenured Laureate
- Posts: 8005
- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 8:35 pm
- Location: USA
The Namesake
By Kirk Honeycutt
Hollywood Reporter
TORONTO -- The fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri conveys a sense of disorientation and loss, of melancholy guilt mingling with the embrace of freedom. She writes of the immigrant experience in America, and the film adaptation of her first novel, "The Namesake," from director Mira Nair honors her themes with a meticulous, understated, empathetic telling of the story of two generations of a Bengali family in America. No film could probably get across Lahiri's rich descriptions of the quotidian that so vividly dramatize the contrast in cultural ways of thinking and the identity confusions at the heart of her story. Nair's film settles for something closer to the surface that makes its dramatic points well and brings Lahiri's characters to life but misses the emotional intensity.
"The Namesake" is a highly personal film for its three authors -- Nair, Lahiri and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, all women of Indian origin who have lived much of their lives in the West. It's hard to imagine a better cast or production values, so the film should find audiences among sophisticated urban adults. Certainly Lahiri's books have created a large fan base around the world for what is a universal story of a family in transition.....
....Penn, a fine Indian-American actor getting a crack at his first lead in a major film, brings wonderful comic sensibility to the role that makes Gogol a much more companionable and amusing companion than his literary counterpart. But when the moment arrives, where Gogol/Nikhil has to grow up immediately and take over his responsibilities, Penn shows you a man who discovers his Indian-ness. The lightness of his earlier scenes gives way to a more somber and perplexed individual. It's a smart performance.
The older actors, Khan and Tabu, who perform mostly in Indian art-house movies, also alter their characters from the novel in subtle ways, suggesting more warmth and love in the parents' lives. Neither actor is Bengali, yet both are more than credible with the accent, language and manner of people from that state.
The movie makes one jolting leap from Gogol as a teen to his job and romance following university graduation with a degree in architecture. It's more than a little bewildering and suggests a drastic post-production editing decision.
Consequently, Gogol's romances have been reduced to two: with a rich but really nice American named Maxine (Jacinda Barrett), a woman who best expresses the social freedoms of the West, and Moushimi (Zuleika Robinson), a fellow Bengali who demonstrates what can happen when someone living a dual life takes freedoms too far.
Cinematographer Frederick Elmes and production designer Stephanie Carroll don't push the contrasts between New York and Calcutta, letting those locations speak eloquently for themselves. Nitin Sawhney's Indian-spiced music is just right.
By Kirk Honeycutt
Hollywood Reporter
TORONTO -- The fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri conveys a sense of disorientation and loss, of melancholy guilt mingling with the embrace of freedom. She writes of the immigrant experience in America, and the film adaptation of her first novel, "The Namesake," from director Mira Nair honors her themes with a meticulous, understated, empathetic telling of the story of two generations of a Bengali family in America. No film could probably get across Lahiri's rich descriptions of the quotidian that so vividly dramatize the contrast in cultural ways of thinking and the identity confusions at the heart of her story. Nair's film settles for something closer to the surface that makes its dramatic points well and brings Lahiri's characters to life but misses the emotional intensity.
"The Namesake" is a highly personal film for its three authors -- Nair, Lahiri and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, all women of Indian origin who have lived much of their lives in the West. It's hard to imagine a better cast or production values, so the film should find audiences among sophisticated urban adults. Certainly Lahiri's books have created a large fan base around the world for what is a universal story of a family in transition.....
....Penn, a fine Indian-American actor getting a crack at his first lead in a major film, brings wonderful comic sensibility to the role that makes Gogol a much more companionable and amusing companion than his literary counterpart. But when the moment arrives, where Gogol/Nikhil has to grow up immediately and take over his responsibilities, Penn shows you a man who discovers his Indian-ness. The lightness of his earlier scenes gives way to a more somber and perplexed individual. It's a smart performance.
The older actors, Khan and Tabu, who perform mostly in Indian art-house movies, also alter their characters from the novel in subtle ways, suggesting more warmth and love in the parents' lives. Neither actor is Bengali, yet both are more than credible with the accent, language and manner of people from that state.
The movie makes one jolting leap from Gogol as a teen to his job and romance following university graduation with a degree in architecture. It's more than a little bewildering and suggests a drastic post-production editing decision.
Consequently, Gogol's romances have been reduced to two: with a rich but really nice American named Maxine (Jacinda Barrett), a woman who best expresses the social freedoms of the West, and Moushimi (Zuleika Robinson), a fellow Bengali who demonstrates what can happen when someone living a dual life takes freedoms too far.
Cinematographer Frederick Elmes and production designer Stephanie Carroll don't push the contrasts between New York and Calcutta, letting those locations speak eloquently for themselves. Nitin Sawhney's Indian-spiced music is just right.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
-
Sonic Youth
- Tenured Laureate
- Posts: 8005
- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 8:35 pm
- Location: USA
The Namesake
By SCOTT FOUNDAS
Variety
In the capable hands of director Mira Nair (bouncing back from the critically and commercially disappointing "Vanity Fair"), Jhumpa Lahiri's wildly popular novel about two generations of a Bengali family receives a loving, deeply felt screen translation that should appease fans of the book while making many new converts. Bolstered by Nair's lush visual style and superb performances from ace Bollywood thesps Iffran Khan, Tabu and "Harold & Kumar" star Kal Penn (in his first dramatic lead), Fox Searchlight can expect above-average arthouse business for this audience-pleasing March release.
Though the condensing of Lahiri's episodic, decades-spanning narrative into two compact hours of screen-time makes for a pic occasionally overstuffed with incident, "The Namesake" remains a richly compelling story of family and self-discovery.
Tale begins in Calcutta in the late 1970s, where a young man, Ashoke (Khan), who has recently survived a horrific train accident, enters into an arranged marriage with the beautiful Ashima (Tabu), whom he has never met before. Together, they travel to New York City, where they settle in a ramshackle cold water flat and begin their new American lives.
Despite all the modern conveniences of a big U.S. city -- in one scene, Ashima excitedly writes home that, in America, one can use the gas 24 hours a day -- the adjustment is a difficult one, and these early scenes are particularly impressive for the subtlety with which Nair and her actors map out the lives of two people who are strangers to each other acclimating to life in a strange land.
When Ashima gives birth to a baby boy, she and Ashoke are informed that, counter to Indian custom -- where years sometimes pass before a child is given a proper name -- the baby must be named before it can leave the hospital. So, they settle on the "good name" of Nikhil and the "pet name" of Gogol, after Ashoke's favorite writer.
But several years later, on Nikhil/Gogol's first day of elementary school, the boy decides to continue going by Gogol, in effect making that his "good name." It is a choice that reverberates throughout the rest of the film, as the sense of a name -- and the history it carries with it -- becomes a lyrical metaphor for the character's own struggle to assert his identity.
Cut to a modern-day high school classroom, where Gogol (now played by Penn) is a moody, shaggy-haired, pot-smoking senior, predictably furious at his parents for giving him such a dumb name. This Gogol is as American as they come, as evidenced by his bratty behavior during a family vacation to India, where he consistently disparages the country for its evident backwardness; and later, by his romance with a WASP-y Manhattan princess (Jacinda Barrett), who invites Gogol (now known as "Nick") for weekends at Oyster Bay and says things like "Everyone loves truffles."
Culture-clash moments like those border on cliche, especially since Barrett's character isn't developed much beyond her surface of moneyed privilege. Better drawn is Gogol's subsequent girlfriend, a fellow Bengali named Moushumi (sultry Zuleikha Robinson), who, like Gogol himself, finds herself torn between obeisance to tradition and pursuing her own desires.
If that conflict isn't exactly new in cinema, it's nevertheless rendered by "The Namesake" with a sensitivity and emotional resonance that elude most films on the subject of cultural assimilation. That's largely thanks to the delicate balance Nair and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala strike between the story's two generational threads, so that Ashima and Ashoke remain significant presences in the second half, even after the primary focus shifts to Nick/Gogol.
Penn -- who has long seemed one of the brightest and most likable young comic talents around -- shows serious dramatic chops as he takes us on Nick/Gogol's expansive odyssey from the proverbial American-Born Confused Desi to a confident young man with a sure sense of his past, his present and his future.
Shot on location in New York and India, pic boasts excellent tech contributions on all fronts, particularly the warm, rich colors of Frederick Elmes' cinematography and Stephanie Carroll's production design, and the varied Western and Eastern influences of composer/DJ Nitin Sawhney's original score.
By SCOTT FOUNDAS
Variety
In the capable hands of director Mira Nair (bouncing back from the critically and commercially disappointing "Vanity Fair"), Jhumpa Lahiri's wildly popular novel about two generations of a Bengali family receives a loving, deeply felt screen translation that should appease fans of the book while making many new converts. Bolstered by Nair's lush visual style and superb performances from ace Bollywood thesps Iffran Khan, Tabu and "Harold & Kumar" star Kal Penn (in his first dramatic lead), Fox Searchlight can expect above-average arthouse business for this audience-pleasing March release.
Though the condensing of Lahiri's episodic, decades-spanning narrative into two compact hours of screen-time makes for a pic occasionally overstuffed with incident, "The Namesake" remains a richly compelling story of family and self-discovery.
Tale begins in Calcutta in the late 1970s, where a young man, Ashoke (Khan), who has recently survived a horrific train accident, enters into an arranged marriage with the beautiful Ashima (Tabu), whom he has never met before. Together, they travel to New York City, where they settle in a ramshackle cold water flat and begin their new American lives.
Despite all the modern conveniences of a big U.S. city -- in one scene, Ashima excitedly writes home that, in America, one can use the gas 24 hours a day -- the adjustment is a difficult one, and these early scenes are particularly impressive for the subtlety with which Nair and her actors map out the lives of two people who are strangers to each other acclimating to life in a strange land.
When Ashima gives birth to a baby boy, she and Ashoke are informed that, counter to Indian custom -- where years sometimes pass before a child is given a proper name -- the baby must be named before it can leave the hospital. So, they settle on the "good name" of Nikhil and the "pet name" of Gogol, after Ashoke's favorite writer.
But several years later, on Nikhil/Gogol's first day of elementary school, the boy decides to continue going by Gogol, in effect making that his "good name." It is a choice that reverberates throughout the rest of the film, as the sense of a name -- and the history it carries with it -- becomes a lyrical metaphor for the character's own struggle to assert his identity.
Cut to a modern-day high school classroom, where Gogol (now played by Penn) is a moody, shaggy-haired, pot-smoking senior, predictably furious at his parents for giving him such a dumb name. This Gogol is as American as they come, as evidenced by his bratty behavior during a family vacation to India, where he consistently disparages the country for its evident backwardness; and later, by his romance with a WASP-y Manhattan princess (Jacinda Barrett), who invites Gogol (now known as "Nick") for weekends at Oyster Bay and says things like "Everyone loves truffles."
Culture-clash moments like those border on cliche, especially since Barrett's character isn't developed much beyond her surface of moneyed privilege. Better drawn is Gogol's subsequent girlfriend, a fellow Bengali named Moushumi (sultry Zuleikha Robinson), who, like Gogol himself, finds herself torn between obeisance to tradition and pursuing her own desires.
If that conflict isn't exactly new in cinema, it's nevertheless rendered by "The Namesake" with a sensitivity and emotional resonance that elude most films on the subject of cultural assimilation. That's largely thanks to the delicate balance Nair and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala strike between the story's two generational threads, so that Ashima and Ashoke remain significant presences in the second half, even after the primary focus shifts to Nick/Gogol.
Penn -- who has long seemed one of the brightest and most likable young comic talents around -- shows serious dramatic chops as he takes us on Nick/Gogol's expansive odyssey from the proverbial American-Born Confused Desi to a confident young man with a sure sense of his past, his present and his future.
Shot on location in New York and India, pic boasts excellent tech contributions on all fronts, particularly the warm, rich colors of Frederick Elmes' cinematography and Stephanie Carroll's production design, and the varied Western and Eastern influences of composer/DJ Nitin Sawhney's original score.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler