- Critic Score
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100Brims with intelligence, compassion and sensuous delight in the textures, sights and sounds of life--all the way from the Taj Mahal to Pearl Jam.
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100Nair takes mostly low-key material about a traditional Indian family raising kids in America and turns it into something sensual, funny and quietly devastating.
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91Moving and marvelous new cross-cultural family saga.
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91The actors are all well-cast, thoughtful and sometimes funny. Tabu was apparently not Nair's first choice, but after watching her in the role it's hard to imagine anyone else -- she's heartbreakingly good.
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91The Namesake takes in a lot of territory, and at times is too diffuse, too attenuated. But the actors are so expressive that they provide their own continuity. They transport us to a realm of pure feeling.
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Despite being rooted in knotty issues of identity, Lahiri's novel forgoes didacticism in favor of vivid portraiture. Nair and her uniformly superb cast take the same tack: The characters are individuals before they are emblems.
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90The Namesake, adapted from Jhumpa Lahiri's popular novel, conveys a palpable sense of people as living, breathing creatures who are far more complex than their words might indicate.
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Reminiscent of Jim Sheridan's masterly "In America," The Namesake delivers such a tactile presence that it's difficult not to leave feeling as if you've just struggled through a New York winter, attended an Indian wedding, and returned from a Calcutta holiday.
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88It has been said that all modern Russian literature came out of Gogol's "Overcoat." In the same way, all of us came out of the overcoat of this same immigrant experience.
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88A rarity, a film that preserves the depth and integrity of its source while bringing the story to life in an indelible way.
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88Overall, this gorgeously designed and photographed movie artfully depicts the immigrant experience in ways that transcend its setting, melding Hollywood and Bollywood storytelling techniques to weave a tale a large audience will relate to.
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88It's a tearjerker, sometimes, and sweetly funny at other moments. It's near perfect.
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88A funny and touching adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri's novel about two generations of Bengali-Americans attempting to reconcile the world of their collective past with that of their individual futures.
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88An engaging and moving film with a universal story about the bonds of family as told through two generations of a Bengali family.
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88The Namesake has a deep, alluvial poetry to it, like a mighty river reaching the sea. It's mysterious and ordinary, insightful and banal, rambling and precise, and it is altogether unexpected.
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88The acting is uniformly excellent. For the roles of Ashoke and Ashima, Nair has employed prolific Bollywood stars Tabu and Irfan Khan, both of whom give performances of great range and empathy.
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88A thoroughly engaging, terrifically moving family story that's rich in beautifully observed and lovingly conveyed human detail.
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80A richly compelling story of family and self-discovery.
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80This immensely pleasurable film is anything but dry. It's a saga of the immigrant experience that captures the snap, crackle and pop of American life, along with the pounding pulse, emotional reticence, volcanic colors and cherished rituals of Indian culture.
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80Although we miss some of the finer details that made Jhumpa Lahiri's 2003 book so meaningful, we're moved by the movie's themes of cultural displacement and the power of chance.
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80After trying her hand at Thackeray with "Vanity Fair," director Mira Nair has found a literary property much closer to her heart: Jhumpa Lahiri's best-selling novel about a Bengali couple and their children trying to find their place in American culture.
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75This is a generational family saga everyone can relate to, and Nair gives it her special magic.
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75The Namesake is suffused with radiant grace, and manages to be old-fashioned yet immediate, epic and intimate.
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75Showing the intricate dynamics of family relationships is something Mira Nair does as well as any director working today.
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75Making you feel the presence of absences - of the distant and the departed, of dreams that never quite come true - is the key thing that this uneven film gets exactly right.
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75It's well-acted and filled with striking compositions, but director Mira Nair has trouble with a different kind of balance.
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70It is hard to imagine a better cast or production values so the film should find audiences among sophisticated urban adults.
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70When The Namesake ends, one feels as though one has lived with the characters instead of just watching them.
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70In her adaptation of The Namesake, Mira Nair hits it right at least half the time. In places, the movie feels aimless and misshapen; it doesn't have the gentle but focused energy of Lahiri's book. And sometimes Nair goes overboard in heightening the cultural contrasts -- the inevitable incongruities between East and West -- that Lahiri navigates so subtly.
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The Namesake carries faint echoes of the carnal physicality that makes Nair's more lightweight movies so much fun to look at--"Monsoon Wedding" was a dandy piece of froth, and "Vanity Fair" survives only on its looks--but it's a quieter, more mature work.
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70There are times when you wish the movie was a mini-series. This is meant both as a tribute, for the Ganguli family is so engaging you'd be happy spending much more time with them, and an acknowledgment that a tale this expansive doesn't always fit comfortably within the constraints of a feature-length frame.
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70It's so courteously deferential to its source that it never really comes alive as a movie...Even so, Nair has a gift for directing actors and a feeling for the immigrant milieu of the novel that make The Namesake a rich, if not completely satisfying, pleasure.
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60This Indian immigrant family saga is a pleasant watch, but given the emotive source novel, it's surprisingly superficial.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 20 out of 26
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Mixed: 4 out of 26
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Negative: 2 out of 26
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ChetR9Nair is beginning to fulfill her promise by evolving into a major filmmaker in a very specialized niche.
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8I've never read the book, but the movie was very good. Well acted and moving. I would suggest not to watch it more than once or twice. 8/10 or 81/100.
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NeilB5Too much plot, too little time. Worthy but a bit cheesy in places