The Namesake, Mira Nair’s film of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, takes globalization-for most of us no more than a concept dealt with in newspaper editorials-and turns it into something concrete, sensuous, funny, and dramatic. The purely economic aspects are there behind the scenes, but in the movie’s foreground are emotional discontents, family fissures, farcical developments, and, above all, the shakiness of identities in a shrinking world.
A young man of Calcutta, Ashoke Ganguli, discovers the fleetingness of life when he is nearly killed in a 1974 train wreck and decides to see as much of the world as possible. For him, to be out in the great wide world is to be in America. He lands a good academic post in the States but returns to India for an arranged marriage. His bride, Ashima, has trouble since America seems both physically and socially cold to her, but gradually she adjusts. Their firstborn is named Gogol in honor of the Russian author whose short-story collection containing “The Overcoat” saved Ashoke’s life after the accident when a rescue worker, who at first thought Ashoke was dead, noticed the volume trembling in his hand. For the resurrected Ashoke, the name “Gogol” is a magic nexus of life affirmation and world culture. (Plus an inside joke: at the beginning of “The Overcoat,” there is much fuss about finding a proper name for the newborn hero.)
But for the boy Gogol, his name epitomizes his cultural confusion. It’s neither an Indian name nor an American one, and the kid feels neither entirely American nor Indian-just plain weird. This self-consciousness will play havoc with his romantic life but, growing into a handsome man, he takes up with an all-American golden girl whose WASP family dotes on him. Gogol returns their affection and neglects his own family. The shock of his father’s unexpected death and the feeling of guilt it inspires lead Gogol to break his engagement. On the rebound he marries an Indian, but this proves a disaster since his wife is a thoroughly Europeanized intellectual, sexually liberated, academically chic, and comfortable with her self-invented identity, while Gogol can only flounder about looking for his.
How Gogol steadies himself, emotionally and culturally, by accepting the destiny meted out to him within the larger destiny of his entire family, is something you can discover only by watching the movie carefully. Nair sums nothing up neatly, instead conveying everything by tiny and large gestures, memorable facial expressions, startling vistas, truthful comedy, and ironic incongruence. The im¬ages, though often gorgeous, contain no simple explanations.
Some examples: Before Ashima comes face to face with the man her parents intend for her, she notices his shoes in the foyer of her home. She places her foot in one of them. Years later, she will jokingly tell her husband that it was his shoe that won her consent. But what actually was it about those shoes? The American brand? Or the fact that they fit her snugly, demonstrating that his feet were no bigger than hers? Was it the promise of America that attracted Ashima, or did the snugness convey a happy portent: if the shoe fits, wear its owner-sole mate as soul mate?
Another example: The Gangulis retain their Hindu religion but always put up a Christmas tree, apparently for the sake of the children. (Or so I assume, not having read the novel.) Even when Gogol absents himself from his family during Yuletide to be with his prospective in-laws while his sister is on the West Coast with her own fiancé and their father is off at a temporary teaching post in Chicago, the tree still goes up, but for whom? Only for the now-solitary Ashima? This strikes a mildly comic/pathetic note until Ashima learns by phone of her husband’s death from a heart attack. In despair she runs outside into a neighborhood lit up at twilight by Christmas lights and decorations. For the camera to fasten on a suffering individual against a background of holiday festivities is to court banality, but to contemplate Ashima, whose own Christmas tree is merely part of the Americanization of her children, enduring her agony alone in the midst of blinking candy canes and reindeer, is to experience a poignant melancholy that saves the scene from banality.
Or again: The inscription his father wrote in a gift copy of Nicolai Gogol’s collected tales finally touches our hero’s heart and is one of the things that leads him back to his heritage and his family responsibilities. But the inscription that a once and future lover writes in a gift copy of Stendhal’s Armance (in the original French, of course) turns Gogol’s wife to thoughts of adultery. One literary classic binds up family ties; the other breaks them.
This film has one (probably unavoidable) fault. Based as it is on what I presume is a long and rich family chronicle, the otherwise deft screenplay by Sooni Taraporevala introduces many interesting characters, yet skimps on the incidents that might fill in the characterizations. How I would have loved another scene with the family retainer in Calcutta (he refers to Ashoke as “master”) who, not understanding the American craze for exercise, runs after the jogging Gogol and bundles him into a rickshaw. Even the major characters need more detail. The Anglo fiancée, though Nair means her to be sympathetic, comes across as an all-American bubblehead. And what exactly does Ashoke teach and how does he get along with his students and the rest of the faculty? Still, overly synoptic as it is, The Namesake runs for over two hours, and I can understand Nair’s wish to keep it theatrically viable. Let us hope there is a four-hour version that could be shown on cable or PBS.
Frederick Elmes’s photography not only captures the heat and color of Calcutta but the look of a New York winter as experienced for the first time by an Indian woman: a landscape seemingly drained of all color. Everything Elmes films takes us behind the eyes of the Gangulis.
The actors-Kal Penn as Gogol, Tabu as Ashima, Irrfan Khan as Ashoke, and the entire supporting cast-are so good that I almost dread seeing them in other roles. I want them to remain these people forever.
Toward the end of the movie, Gogol recalls some episodes from his childhood and early adulthood. We see the memories as they flash before his mind’s eye, and these visual fragments suffice to let us know what he’s feeling since we’ve already encountered these scenes in the course of the story. But the final memory is not a fragment. Gogol’s parents have taken their children to a beach. Ashoke leads little Gogol onto some rocks extending out over the water while Ashima, calling out the usual motherly warnings, stays behind on the sand with her infant daughter. That’s where the scene originally ended when we first encountered it. But now, as father and son gaze out over the water, Ashoke realizes that he forgot his camera. Oh well, he mutters to the boy, we’ll just have to remember all this. And they stand there, caressing the view with their eyes.
The entire movie caresses and embraces the world of this family. And you will remember it.
