Short Takes
THE NAMESAKE More than a chick flick, Mira Nair’s adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel combines the intimate pleasures of a family saga with a finely sustained inquiry into the difficult balance between separation and integration that shapes first-generation émigrés and their children in crucially different ways. Dividing its time between the fortunes of Ashima (ravishing Indian star Tabu), a Bengali immigrant to New York, and those of her anxiously Americanized son Gogol (Kal Penn), The Namesake carries faint echoes of the carnal physicality that makes Nair’s more lightweight movies Kama Sutra and Monsoon Wedding so much fun to look at, but it’s a quietly mature work, shot with muted elegance by Frederick Elmes as it moves between the heat and dust of Calcutta and the ice and slush of New York suburbia. Though the movie never fully resolves the formlessness of Lahiri’s novel, its looseness both defines the predicament of the second-generation immigrant and underscores his strategic edge in navigating the fluidity of urban life. We leave Gogol, still figuring out the eternal dance between adaptation to the new world, defensive reactivity to the old, and the longing for roots. Only now he understands that the dance never ends, that it has its own grace and benediction. —Ella Taylor (Opens Friday at Green Hills)
BLADES OF GLORY Having moved on from the anchor desk and NASCAR, at long last Will Ferrell ridicules a hallowed profession: men’s figure skating. Who until now has dared to mock the sequined costumes, the fondness for power ballads, the Spandex pants? Luckily, Our Man Ferrell is up to the challenge, along with a troupe of the usual suspects (Luke Wilson, Amy Poehler, Will Arnett). In Blades of Glory, he gives us the story of two male skaters (Ferrell and Jon Heder) who decide to become a pair due to a chain of events too ludicrous to mention. Even as it points its finger and laughs at every easy target in sight, the film is also bizarrely earnest: Don’t worry, it tells you, figure skating with another man doesn’t make you gay, not even when your partner lifts you so high your crotch is in his face. It almost goes without saying that this undercurrent of homoeroticism is not handled deftly. Blades does capture the obvious eccentricities of the skating world, and is funny up to a point, but by now Ferrell & Co. have the formula for a mild comedy down pat. What they need is a little soul. —Julia Wallace (Opens Friday everywhere)
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