Interview. Mira Nair.

"If anyone's going to flock to this warmly likable tale, based on the best-selling novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, it's going to be women, yet it seems a pity to confine the movie behind the bars of a chick flick," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly. "Dividing its time between the fortunes of a Bengali immigrant to New York and those of her anxiously Americanized son, The Namesake combines the intimate pleasures of a family saga with a finely sustained inquiry into the difficult balance between separation and integration that shapes the consciousness of first-generation émigrés and their children in crucially different ways."

"Nair (whose previous movie was the 2004 Vanity Fair) manages to infuse the movie with not-too-cloying sweetness, perhaps partly because she knows when to back off and allow her two older actors - Irrfan Khan, as Ashoke, and the Bollywood star Tabu, who plays Ashima - to carry the movie," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "Their scenes together (and luckily they have many of them) are so lovely, and so deeply believable, that the movie's other flaws momentarily melt away."

Updated through 3/15.

"Color is the stuff of life in the movies of Mira Nair," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Her lush palette lends her films a throbbing physicality that invites you to step into the screen and embrace the sensuous here and now.... The story of upwardly mobile immigrants torn between tradition and modernity as they are absorbed into the American melting pot has been told in countless movies. This variation is gentle and compassionate. The longing for roots of these displaced middle-class Indians lends a soulful undertow to a film conspicuously lacking in melodrama."

For the Los Angeles, Susan King talks with Nair and Kal Penn, who plays Gogol - quite a break from "his broad comedic turns in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and Epic Movie." Robert Cashill's comment: "In a key way, The Namesake reminded me of The Graduate, in that both feature star-making central performances."

"Though The Namesake slackens in places, particularly toward the end, the performances, especially those of Khan and Tabu, are beautifully drawn," writes Michelle Orange for the Reeler.

Dan Persons talks with Nair for IFC News and Jennifer Merin interviews her for the New York Press.

Online listening tip. Nair is also a guest on Fresh Air and the Leonard Lopate Show.

Online viewing tip. Nair on LX.TV.

Updates, 3/15: Matt Prigge in the Philadelphia Weekly: "It's apparent Nair has found equilibrium - a smooth fusion of the novelistic and the cinematic."

"[E]ven when it loses focus, [The Namesake] deserves credit for its graceful attempt to tell an all-American story with warm, unromanticized characters trying to discover who they are in a land too eager to impose its own definition on them," writes the AV Club's Keith Phipps.

"[G]orgeously shot and told," writes Sapna Samant for the Lumière Reader. "There is not a moment of exoticism or self-conscious 'us-traditional-but-modern-Indians' Bollywoodisms.... Anyone with a migrant experience can relate to it."

A review and an interview from Cindy Fuchs in the Philadelphia City Paper.

Posted by dwhudson at March 9, 2007 1:24 PM