Namesake, The


Rating = B+

I stated to give this movie a B rating because the movie seemed a little sterile to me. However, I continued to think about it a lot over the next couple of days, and this led me to raise my rating to a B+. The movie is quite true to Jhumpa Lahiri's novel of the same name, and this requires the movie to cover a span of 25 years (in an episodic way). The movie does a good job of showing the loneliness of the wife and mother, Ashima Ganguli, in America and how she is caught between cultures, but I feel she is a stronger more adaptable character in the movie.

Altogether, the movie does a good job of illustrating the cultural difficulty and confusion faced by immigrants to a new country and even faced by their children who are born and grow up in the new country. The current demands by so many people in the United States that new immigrants more or less totally embrace our culture and language seem pretty unreasonable in light of this story. At best we can hope their children will do as well or better than the second generation in this story did. But we should know that to the extent new immigrants or immigrants' children successfully embrace our culture, they will surely be cut off from not only their prior culture but from a close relationships with their parents.

[2007-03-23]