The Namesake

Saturday I went to see The Namesake, a film by Mira Nair. I came from the film with mixed feelings. Firstly, this is one of the few films that I watched that made me feel like I was watching a three-day serial in one sitting. It was like watching the third installment of LOTR, the film could have ended probably half an hour before it finally did and not be worse for the editing. That said, there are moments in the film that I really enjoyed, and I have to agree with Stephanie Zacherek of Salon.com that the two brightest jewels of the film were the parents, who came together in India and immigrated to America to begin a new life for their family.

Whenever the two of them share the screen together, the poignancy of the moment deepens and thickens. The time when Ashima locks herself in the bathroom to shed a few self-pitying tears at being scolded by her newly wed husband for shrinking his clothes at laundromat illustrated the typical domestic disagreements of any young couple. What was particularly sweet however was how the husband, immediately chastened, coaxed his wife out of the bathroom by cooing a litany of little sweet nothings, “my ashima, my crazy ashima, come out, my sweet sweet ashima.” Inspite of her tears, she starts to grin nonetheless. It was not only a realistic portrayal of a young couple, it was a glimpse into the tenderness that the two shared.

As a first generation immigrant who was raised in America however, I can empathize deeply with some of the themes of this film. I can understand feeling both ashamed and proud of one’s ethnic heritage and the jarring conflicting feelings of this duality. I can also understand seeing a person who is Caucasian and mainstream in every way and feeling like we are light years apart in terms of our life perspectives. At times, that feeling occasionally turns into outright rejection (as Gogol did to Maxine). And even as I do so, I am meanwhile sipping my Starbucks mocha latte, surfing the web and chatting on my cellphone. I am no more or no less different than I choose to think myself to be. I can also somewhat empathize how the parents must feel whenever they look at their children and see only strangers. Surely at times my own mom has looked at me in astonishment, thinking, “How on earth did I give birth to this…creature?” Because as if the generation gap isn’t a wide enough gulf, often there is a cultural gap, contributed in part by the environment I grew up in, a world vastly different from their own.

The film by Mira Nair is the film of every middle-class immigrant who has sought a new life in America. The film highlights the tension for children caught between the old and the new who are not sure, often times, which way to go. For all its good intentions, it sometimes became overly ambitious, trying to say too much at once and ending up not getting anything very clearly across. The film would have benefited from slowing down, splicing out unnecessary footage, and forming a stronger cohesive vision. Yet irregardless, it was nice for me, as a Chinese-American, to sit through a film about an Indian-American and to realize, aah yes, I can relate. I’ve been there.