The Reluctant Fundamentalist (**3/4)

In films such as Mississippi Masala and The Namesake, Mira Nair has frequently focused on individuals caught between two worlds or identities. Here, adapting a novel by Mohsin Hamid, she adds to that a suspense element. The main character is Changez (Riz Ahmed), a Pakistani university professor suspected of being involved in the kidnapping of an American in Lahore. But he is also a former Wall Street hotshot who specialized in trimming waste (and personnel) from struggling companies. His story is told in a series of flashbacks constructed around a conversation between Changez and a journalist (Lieve Shcreiber) after the kidnapping.

There is a mutual distrust that is not, as we learn, entirely irrational. Changez fears that he will be arrested; the journalist wonders if Changez is guilty. How did the clean-cut, America-loving Princeton student become a bearded radical? Naturally, 9/11 and its aftermath is a turning point. In a welcome change from her frothier roles, Kate Hudson plays Changez’s American love interest, an artist, and Om Puri plays his father. (Puri also played the father in My Son the Fanatic, which had a theme that somewhat echoes this.)

As a meditation on Changez’s internal conflict, this is competent. As a suspense drama, it’s pretty decent, but the fact that we don’t know if Changez is guilty is partly the result of the surface-level character depiction. His turn toward an anti-American radicalism is depicted as primarily the result of unfair treatment. But surely, there is an ideological inspiration behind such a change in this intellectually gifted man. Has he adopted a radical interpretation of Islam? (We see one scene in a mosque, and that’s about it.) Has he read Noam Chomsky? Admittedly, this is difficult turf for a film. Nair has not made the definitive film on terrorism, but merely a decent yarn with a political dimension.

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viewed 4/29/13 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/30/13

Wonderful World (***)

This is one of those movies in which the main character is so extreme, extremely cynical and down on life, in this case, that the story is obviously going to be about how he’ll change. Ben Singer (Matthew Broderick) is the sad sack in this case, a divorced proofreader who thinks The Man is keeping people down, and feels down about that. He ex worries that his negativity is rubbing off on their tween daughter. He has imaginary, or dreamed, conversations with The Man, ably personified by Philip Baker Hall, who explains that while everyone has bad impulses, not everyone has good ones.

Like Richard Jenkins’s character in The Visitor, Ben lives with a more carefree Senegalese, but it takes a woman—his roommate’s visiting sister (Sanaa Lathan)—to change his worldview. A directorial debut from screenwriter Josh Goldin, Wonderful World doesn’t have many sharp edges, and Ben’s facile ephiphany comes with the unnecessary suggestion that it takes belief in a kind of literal magic to be happy. But it tells a nice tale without pretense. Broderick provides a low-key performance that made Ben seem less obnoxious than he might otherwise sound. He almost made me believe that such a curmudgeon could have truly been, of all things, the former children’s singer (yes, named Singer) he is supposedly to be.

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viewed 1/21/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 1/24/10

The Brothers Bloom (**1/2)

The greatest trick in any film about con artists is to get the audience to buy the tale. Alas, in writer Rian Johnson’s follow-up to Brick, they may not. That the brothers are played by non-lookalikes Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo doesn’t help; nor do they look like the child actors in the opening sequence. But that’s not a big deal. More significant is that in that sequence the two boys look like bowler-hat-wearing twits, and their elementary-school swindle is not rendered convincingly. The first scene with the adult brothers—still conning—is rendered in such a stagy fashion that I expected the camera to pull back and reveal that Brody and Ruffalo had become actors in a play.

I liked the movie somewhat better once I got used to its rhythm. There are two other members of the brothers’ team. Rinko Kikuchi (Babel), as their mysterious, nearly mute Japanese explosives expert, is equal parts cute and coy, even if her role is contrived. And Rachel Weicz does well enough with the character—the wealthy mark—who actually has the most dimensions. She’s supposedly an expert in, among other things, several musical instruments, a martial art or two, juggling, and unicycling, and speaks multiple languages. Except for the last, she doesn’t get to use any of these abilities. Now why have such a character and not use that? Of course, her primary function is to pair up with Bloom, the brother played by Brody, but if you don’t figure that out immediately you may have never seen a movie.

So the usual questions get raised. Will Bloom choose love or money? Will his brother Stephen the supposed genius of the operation, let him decide? And what is real and what’s just a con? All of the ingredients of the classic caper film, but The Sting it’s not. Johnson can evoke a style, but it never feels very organic. I thought the same thing about Brick, in which high schoolers used 1930s detective-novel slang, although plenty of people seemed impressed. Here, Johnson has Stephen drawing elaborate diagrams and using Herman Melville novels (no, not Moby Dick) as inspiration for his con jobs, but they never seem as clever as they’re supposed to. It would also have been nice if the grand finale, in which all of the themes (finally) come together with more action than the rest of the movie, had actually been comprehensible. Stephen says, in the movie’s best line, that the best cons are the one that leave everyone feeling they got what they want. And if you want to give the audience what it wants, you need to let them feel like they’re in on the action.


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viewed 6/6/09 at Tilton 9 and reviewed 6/7/09

This Christmas (**3/4)

A feel-good melodrama about brothers and sisters reuniting for the holiday in not-so-festive Los Angeles. Not a Tyler Perry movie, but a similar feel to it.

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Freshman Orientation (***)

The title is a pun that refers to its main character’s ploy to cozy up to his college classmate—he pretends to be gay so he won’t seem threatening to her. While on its face as silly as the similarly premised I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, the humor’s more similar to other teen comedies like, say, Superbad. Besides the main storyline, the movie wittily satirizes various campus types ranging from homophobic jocks to politically correct lesbians. There are a few familiar faces, including John Goodman as a matronly tavern owner. The abbreviated art-house release, a couple of years after then movie played the festival circuit, seems odd. Its primary appeal would seem to be with an audience that may not even notice it.

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reviewed 9/14/07

The Namesake (***1/4)

? Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding) directed this adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel about Bengali immigrants to the United States, with Kal Penn playing their son as an adult. The adaptation is by Sooni Taraporevala, who also scripted Nair’s breakthrough film Salaam Bombay and its follow-up, Mississippi Masala, which was her first to tackle the culture-clash themes explored here.
+ There’s something about the storytelling here that begs to be called beautiful. It’s an appealingly quiet film in which Nair’s camera carefully expresses the feelings of the characters, especially the parents. Snowy rooftops and quiet music stand for the isolation felt by the mother, who does not adapt as readily as her husband to her adopted country. The Namesake doesn’t overplay the culture-clash angle, but instead incorporates that as part of a larger story about a changing family dynamic. Even as the focus shifts to the son’s story, it reminds us that the older generation continues to experience life’s changes even as the new one grows up.
- Undoubtedly some people will find the movie slow, and the plot is by no means earth-shattering.
= ***1/4 This is in some ways an Indian story, but in more significant ways one about assimilation and family life, something like Barry Levinson’s Avalon, but less depressing and less sweeping.

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reviewed 4/6/07

Something New (**3/4)

Sanaa Lathan is a tightly wound black executive who reluctantly but realistically falls for a charming landscaper who happens to be white.

It’s kind of surprising to me that movies with interracial romances are still a minor novelty. But then, a lot of the characters in this movie wouldn’t approve, not even the up-and-coming executive played by Sanaa Lathan. She gets along fine with her white coworkers, but when one sets her up on a blind date, she bolts when she sees who it is. In a twist on almost every Queen Latifah movie, Simon Baker is the white guy trying to loosen up the uptight black chick. This is less funny than the similarly themed Guess Who, but that was really a comedy about a guy and his father-in-law, whereas this is closer to straight drama, and almost wholly from the woman’s view. (I kind of wondered why the guy still pursued her after she made her preference known, except that she’s a looker.) The comic relief comes largely from Donald Faison (of TV’s Scrubs) as her serial-womanizing brother who nonetheless doesn’t believe in crossing the color line. I know there are plenty of people who agree with him, so I was hoping there’d be a scene where one of them would get challenged to explain why. Something New doesn’t dig that deep, but a solid lead character makes it worthwhile.

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