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Namesake, TheIts title might suggest a 1960s American Western, but The Namesake mixes East and West. A young Bengali immigrant family in New York contemplates integration and belonging in their adopted homeland.
Director Mira Nair retreads a path through which many other filmmakers have trampled in recent years, but adds a much-needed dose of realism. Forget the reductive characters of the sympathetic immigrant fables of Gurinder Chadha - here, there is plenty of bad blood and bad behaviour in the portrayal of the problems faced by many a second-generation US immigrant family: how to balance your family heritage with chasing that exclusively American dream.
Kal Penn plays the namesake in question, a man with two different identities. To his peers, he is Nik, to his family Gogol - a confusion for which he blames his parents - and it is as these very different lives begin to diverge even further during his adolescence that he finally contemplates the struggle his own parents went through 20 years earlier. His is a middle-class family, as uncomfortable in the crowded Howrah train station of Calcutta as it is in the stark cityscapes of New York, where everyone and everything is behind glass, real or imagined.
Gradually they discover connections between the two worlds they now inhabit, first, appropriately enough, between two bridges: Calcutta's Howrah Bridge and the 59th Street Bridge in Manhattan, which seems like a distant cousin; and the distinctive holographic Travelogues installation at the bridge between their two worlds: the international terminal of New York's JFK Airport. In fact, the playful visuals of cinematographer Frederick Elmes (a favourite of Ang Lee and David Lynch) sometimes keep the audience as disorientated as the characters: are we seeing the River Hooghly or the Hudson River? Nitin Sawhney, a cosmopolitan master of mixing musical genres and styles, keeps the deliberate confusion going. The Ganguli family's lives and memories are made real.
These light touches also penetrate the film's prologue - an epic of its own - in which we witness the meeting and marriage of Gogol's parents, and their physical and emotional trek towards their first few days in New York. As she nervously prepares to meet her husband-to-be in advance of her arranged marriage, a barefoot Ashima (Tabu) notices his shoes bear the legend 'Made in the USA', and warily tries them on.
Beautifully stylised though it is, The Namesake has a lot to get through in its two hours, and bravely adds the massive backstory of Gogol's parents' meeting, marriage and migration to its source novel's already portly 291 pages. It is not until about halfway into the film that we finally meet Gogol as an adult, and, from there, the film gathers yet more momentum as it speeds through its extended story. Supporting characters flash past, and even those in the foreground, like Gogol's American girlfriend and his own sister, are one-dimensional.
Talented players like Jacinda Barrett, Linus Roache and Glenne Headly simply go through the motions and pick up the pay cheque. Our dispirited Namesake barely has time to contemplate his own navel; the audience cares very little for his turmoil; we're long since carried away by his parents' progress from Calcutta and up the American class ladder, and the delicate vulnerability of enchanting performances by Bollywood thesps Irfan Khan and Tabu. Gogol or Nik? It's difficult to care.
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