The Namesake: A Badly Flawed Movie

The Namesake
A film directed by Mira Nair
(Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2007)


As a first-generation Bengali immigrant from Kolkata (Calcutta), I’m happy that a long-overdue film to tell our story to the mainstream audience is done. Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer-winning novel and Mira Nair’s much-hyped filming of it expose our many experiences migrating, living and bringing up the children in an environment of isolation and identity crisis. In a country where the new-immigrant experience is ignored or undermined, The Namesake is a welcome breath of fresh air. Undoubtedly, such a story would please the open-minded and liberal Western viewer, and the educated-affluent, South Asian immigrants.

My problem is that both the Wall Street-honored novel and film do just that: please a naïve, apolitical audience that fails to dig deeper into the superficial, nice concepts of diversity, assimilation, cultural conflicts and personal tragedies in this so-called Melting Pot. The story, however well-meant, successfully keeps the first-observer uninformed about the true tale of a new immigrant’s life and struggle. Just like the bizarre Bengali pronunciations by its primary characters, the film, with its often-imposed and superfluous sequences, misses a great opportunity to transform the story from an obvious, broad-brush landscape into a masterful one, grounded in earth.

One of the best moments the film makes a strong point about an immigrant’s de-humanization is when the newcomer Bengali mother gets the news of her husband’s sudden death through the voice of a dispassionate telephone operator at a distant hospital. But knowingly or not, the storyteller decides not to spend any more time on it, and even though it could have been the story’s major, poignant departure, it was not meant to be. And the film didn’t even bother to tell the stories of the millions of other immigrants whose jeopardy is exacerbated by their desperate economic and immigration status in an apathetic and often exploitative system.

The Namesake is a "pleasant" yet seriously flawed portrayal of the immigrant experience in today's America.


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