Homecoming

“I don’t want to raise our son in this lonely country.” So says Ashima, a very young Bengali mother who has left her teeming and overstuffed life in Calcutta to journey to the deserted streets of Yonkers, N.Y., in the company of a gentle man named Ashoke–a man with whom she first exchanged words at their wedding ceremony because theirs is an arranged marriage.

The year, astonishingly, is 1978.

The Namesake–a quiet, unassuming, and ultimately overpowering new movie–is the story of Ashima’s life in America, even though the title refers not to her but to her son. It is an adaptation of a much-praised novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, and it improves on the novel in very nearly every respect. Lahiri, who made her reputation with a brilliant collection of short stories called Interpreter of Maladies, centers her novel on Ashima’s son and his struggle with his first name. His father dubs him Gogol, after the Russian writer.

This was a creatively suicidal decision, because Lahiri does not write well about men and her Gogol is an extremely dull and uninteresting character from the moment he emerges from the womb until the last page, when he finally cracks open a collection of his namesake’s short stories. Fortunately for the film, director Mira Nair cast a 30-year-old Indian-American actor named Kal Penn as Gogol.

Penn, known for his turns in a few extremely stupid teen comedies, is pitch-perfect both as a pot-addled high school geek and as a too-cool-for-school Manhattan yuppie. Even though Penn has been acting in films for a decade, this performance is an annunciation. It heralds the emergence of a potentially great actor whose work we will be admiring for decades to come. Penn is so compelling that he single-handedly breathes the life and emotion into Gogol’s journey that Gogol’s own creator could not.

Unfortunately, director Nair and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala can’t make any better sense out of Lahiri’s choice of Nikolai Gogol as a central motif for the American-born son of Indian immigrants. A remark that appears in the movie but not in the book–“We all come out of Gogol’s overcoat”–only serves to confuse matters. After all, “The Overcoat” is literature’s foremost work of nihilistic absurdism while The Namesake is a small domestic drama about decent people trying to do their best as they figure out how to live in a strange land.

The movie captures better than any other the emotional distress of homesickness–waking up to unfamiliar noises in an unfamiliar setting and the quiet panic of not knowing where to go or what to do or what the new rules are. Ashima finds herself alone for the first time in her life. She is alone during the day while her husband works, alone while giving birth, alone while raising her children. She agrees to stay because America is the land of opportunity for her children. The lonely country eventually opens up to Ashima, in part through the kind ministrations of her husband, a good man and devoted father.

The Indian parents beget American children, Gogol and his sister Sonia, and those American children view their parents both with respect and at a great distance. They hate their long summertime trips to India, where they must live cheek by jowl with relatives and servants in blistering heat. And yet a trip to the Taj Mahal convinces Gogol to pursue architecture as a career.

He takes up with a very blonde, very rich, very fashionable girlfriend named Maxine and even moves in with her and her family in a lavish Chelsea townhouse. But when tragedy befalls the family, Maxine is impatient with Gogol’s grief, which seems somehow un-American to her. Awash in regret, Gogol seeks to heal himself by embracing his roots and marrying a Bengali woman he knew during his teenage years. But it turns out that his wife is even more torn between her background and her yearning for the West than he is.

In the end, The Namesake is about the discovery every first-generation American makes about his parents–that the journey they had to make was far more difficult and complex than anything their children have had to face. And the great beauty of this movie is Gogol’s slow realization that the emotional reticence of his parents–their failure to speak endearments to each other and to make public displays of affection–means far less than the unshakable love they feel for each other, and for the children for whom they have given up so much, and from whom they have asked so little in return.

John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic.