DVD REVIEW: "The Namesake"

The Ganguli family (Kal Penn, Irrfan Khan, Sahira Nair, Tabu) visit the Taj Mahal.

"The Namesake" offers us a different perspective on the immigrant story, a perspective I probably can't credit either director Mira Nair or her screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala with originating. No, I think it's probably lifted directly from Jhumpa Lahiri's popular novel. I say "probably" because I never read the novel.

The concept is simply this: Second generation Americans can accept the American way of life over the traditions of their parents without rejecting their parents in the process. All it takes is a lot of understanding, compassion and love, emotions Nair and Taraporevala have dealt with before, in films like "Salaam Bombay" and "Mississippi Masala," but never in such depth and never so assuredly.

The Namesake of the title is not a family member. It is a Russian author Nikolai Gogol, who apparently tried to write a Russian version of Dante's "Divine Comedy" and whose short story "The Overcoat" is widely considered a literary masterpiece. It is also central to this movie.

In 1974 Ashoke Ganguli (Irrfan Khan) is reading "The Overcoat" during a train trip in India to visit his grandfather. A friendly stranger he meets on the train tries to tell Ashoke he should leave India and see the world, but Ashoke said he has learned from his grandfather that he can see the world in the pages of a book. Then the train crashes and most of the passengers, including the stranger, are killed. Ashoke miraculously survives.

He takes the man's advice and goes to New York where he studies to become an engineer. Just prior to entering graduate school he returns to the family home in Calcutta where, in a pre-arranged marriage, he weds a classically trained singer named Ashima (Tabu) and brings her back to a life of loneliness and isolation in New York. The interludes following their settling in America are delicately and beautifully handled with both actors compassionately and believably acknowledging and accepting their new life together.

Soon they have a son. They are told that the boy cannot leave the hospital unless he has a name that can be registered on a birth certificate. Apparently in India there is no rush to name a child--a job eventually handled by its maternal grandmother. But since their son needs a name now, Ashoke chooses the name Gogol because that writer wrote "The Overcoat" while he was an ex-patriate living in Paris, much like Ashoke and Ashima are outside of their homeland.

Gogol grows into his teenage years (and from here on he is played by Kal Penn in a remarkable breakout performance from his previously best known film, "Harold & Kumar Go to the White Castle"), although earlier he was finally given a real name, Nikhil (which, of course, becomes westernized as "Nick"). During this time he feels the name Gogol is a major handicap, re-inforcing the cultural tensions between the country in which he was born and the country of his parents. The tensions are further heightened by a trip to India with his parents and sister Sonia (Sahira Nair) during which the siblings ridicule the lack of American conveniences and later with Gogol/Nick's love affair with Maxine (Jacinda Barrett, who brings some humanity to a thankless part).

I am not going to go much more into the storyline here because "The Namesake" is not about its story anyway, more than it is incidents in the lives of this family--the first half being the awkward journey of Ashoke and Ashima and the second half being those that influence Gogol. Let it be said that Gogol does make an attempt to embrace the traditional way of life but learns even marrying a Bengali woman (Zuleikha Robinson) will not provide him with the overcoat his father told him to find for himself.

In the end, however, Gogol learns to love and respect the dignity and the strength of his parents even as he rejects the traditions that gave them those traits.

And when all is said and done, I think that's the right approach. After all, shouldn't we love and respect our parents for who they are more than for what they are?

Grade: A-