Movie Review: The Namesake

The Namesake, based on the novel of the same name by Jhumpa Lahiri, is the story of two generation of an Indian family and their struggles to adjust to the West (in the older generation) and to understand the East (in the younger generation. Throughout The Namesake Mira Nair works to draw careful comparisons between New York City and Calcutta, allowing us some measure of understanding often before the characters themselves find it.

This comparison and unification is brought to us largely through architecture (appropriately, as this is the profession of The Namesake's protagonist, Gogol) and reminds us that the United States and India both possess colonial history and can easily be considered a new world or The New World depending on who you are and in which direction you are traveling. And it is traveling that everyone in The Namesake is doing seemingly constantly.

Planes and trains and occasionally cars and rickshaws take us across both India and America, reminding us that each are vast and continually foreign landscapes on which we, and The Namesake's characters, are merely small players. Not that this notion prevents The Namesake from having an epic tone. Rather, this is almost inevitable with Nair, who has a habit of making movies about small and often internal stories and articulating them in vast, cinematic language.

Unfortunately, Nair dials up the emotional intensity and symbolic moments early and often in The Namesake, making it difficult to journey or experience revelation alongside her characters. Throughout The Namesake I wanted time to savor recurring details, such as the image of shoes by a door -- meaning visitors, foreign culture, death, hospitality, memory, home -- but we were always too quickly hustled onto the next equally interesting, but overloaded symbolic piece of the film's landscape.