Director Mira Nair's "The Namesake" glistens with a narrative exuberance that is strangely at odds with the intense struggle that characterizes this tale. But Nair's adaptation of a archetypal story of self discovery is a sharper transition than most. Based on the novel by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri, the film strips away the varnish of social and generational gaps to find even in tragedy an enduring, universal wisdom and beauty.

The film centers on Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, immigrants to New York from Calcutta in the Indian state of West Bengal. A laid-back college professor, Ashoke is at first unprepared for the difficulty his wife has in transitioning from her communal, family-oriented life in Calcutta to a dingy apartment near a college campus. He struggles with his busy college schedule to find time for visits to Indian friends and ethnic stores, but his wife's homesickness is embedded in more than superficial relations or material goods.

Through tears of loneliness, apprehension of a foreign society and a compounding sense of alienation, Ashima remains committed to her life in America. She gives birth to a boy, named by Ashoke after Nikolai Gogol, the famous Russian author and wayfarer in his own time, without whose literary influence this family would never have existed.

Through a careful balance of curiosity, respect and charm, Nair grants audiences a peek into the life of an immigrant family without any condescending sense of pity. The film has no delusions of pontificating on the consummate immigrant experience, even if many critics have lazily misread that in it. This is simply an exceptionally colorful and subtle depiction of one family's struggle and growth.

The main character in the story is Gogol, their son, played here by Kal Penn ("Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle"), who needs no introduction to campus audiences. Penn brings to his brash-then-anguished character an emotional and thematic dexterity we could never have guessed he had (and certainly not from his role in last year's "Superman Returns," where he had several chances to grunt a single line which went something like: "Aaaaah!").

But even if he's better than ever, Penn is nowhere close to Bollywood veterans Tabu and Irfan Khan, who play his mother and father, respectively. The laurels of emotional suppression and rebirth that define the thematic core of Lahiri's novel are beautifully illustrated by the performances of these two actors. Not only do they melt into their roles, they carry into believability even the film's weakest performers.

Spectacular in many ways, "The Namesake" manages as a film what even Lahiri's novel could not: It maintains an emotional tenor throughout and doesn't get distracted by the many non sequiturs that inevitably comprise life. In skipping entire chapters of the periodically scattered novel, it skims off many layers of embellishment that would be easily misinterpreted by movie audiences and presents only the most meaningful episodes of its rich source. It is, as such, a near-perfect adaptation.

Four stars out of five

The Namesake
At the Michigan Theatre

Fox Searchlight