The Namesake (2006) (nat)

Like most things I really want but am denied for ages, this movie did not live up to my expectations. My little internal pictureshow while reading the book did not match up with Mira Nair's. And I think I've decided that I am not a fan of her movies (Joel and I watched Monsoon Wedding the other week).

So, my main issue with Nair's version of The Namesake is that she seems to miss the point of the novel. The story is a simple one about an American-born child, Gogol, of Indian immigrant parents (who immigrated when adults) and that child's struggle balancing his Indian culture (which he tries so hard to deny because it makes him odd in a McDonald's world) and the American culture he knows and loves. It's a typical coming of age story with the rebellion from parents, denial of inheritance, etc but with the addition of the cultural aspect. Nair makes the movie way too much about the parents and India. She's in love with giving the viewer random, unrelated (to each other and what's going on in the film) shots of India. She's in love with India, which is fine and lovely and beneficial to that country. What is not fine, lovely, or beneficial is when she takes a story of the struggle of an Indian-American to be American and makes it about India. There is very little of Gogol out in the world, which is what the majority of the novel is and what we need to see in order to see the child come of age.

While the novel covers all of the information presented in the movie, a good book adaptation (unlike my last viewing of the adaptation of the Good Book) should strike a balance between including too much of the source material and cutting out too much of what makes the story. Nair actually managed to include too much and cut out too much. By giving too much time to the parents' story, she gives us quite a bit of the necessary back story but does so to the detriment of the current story. We understand the parents' love story much more than we understand what's going on with Gogol. While the whole movie is devoted to the older love story, we breeze through two of Gogol's long term affairs, both of which are reduced to stereotypes.

Further, any story that is trying to dissect the clash of cultures, whether on a grand scale or a personal internal scale, has to be super careful to avoid such stereotypes. Instead, Nair's movie exalts the traditional Indian and the more traditional Indian-American woman but shuns (1) the white, blonde, bohemian, selfish, call your elders by their first names, bring truffles as a gift, fail to understand culture differences and wear black to an Indian funeral girl and (2) the Indian-British-American girl who tries too hard to be Anglo in that she sleeps with a whole slew of men, has one fiance leave her almost at the altar, and cheats on her husband. So, while this movie isn't as racist/anti-peoples as Passion, it ends up being racist.

All in all, Nair manages, in all three of her movies that I've seen (Monsoon, Namesake, and Vanity Fair), to make an oddly scattered, disjointed story that lacks any real heart--it ends up being like a freshman paper or what you end up with if you ask MS Word to summarize a document (it just picks out the first sentence of each paragraph)--most of the information is there but you're lacking argument and explication and you end up not caring at all. Sadly not really worth a watch to me (but I'm also in an odd position in that I'm stacking it up against the book and a long wait).