Brick Lane.

"Sarah Gavron's Brick Lane is the kind of movie a critic would just as soon let pass without comment," writes Elbert Ventura at indieWIRE. "Unchallenging and inoffensive, it gives little to work with, its soft-focus take on a rich novel less outrageous than enervating. The potential for a banalized transposition was always there. Monica Ali's bestseller approached issues of cultural dislocation and female empowerment with sensitivity and nuance, but faint whiffs of Lifetime wafted through at certain moments. In Gavron's hands, those shortcomings find their full flowering."

Updated through 6/20.

Ella Taylor, writing in the Voice, finds it "absorbing enough, moving enough, and visually attractive enough to provide a perfectly acceptable night out at the movies."

"If it weren't painful enough that Gavron deals entirely in cliché caricature..., her queasily romanticized style misrepresents the sad and sometimes perilous lives of her subjects," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "[E]ven when 9/11 is invoked the film doesn't so much suggest a melodrama of the heart and spirit as it does an explosion at a fabric store."

For Mary Block, writing in the L Magazine, "Brick Lane is beautifully made and told, captivating its audience within its tiny sphere."

Earlier: Reviews from the UK.

Updates: For the IFC, Aaron Hillis talks with Gavron "about adapting Ali's book, her surprising experiences within the Bangladeshi community, and the sea change for women's filmmakers today."

"Brick Lane manages to be both textured and stunning yet loses the book's distinctive spirit and overall complexity," writes Nick Plowman. "A resonant effort of high quality and distinguishing beauty indeed, Brick Lane falters one too many times to be considered great."

Updates, 6/19: "In films, fat people often get the comedic roles, but in Brick Lane, Chanu, as played by veteran Indian actor-director Satish Kaushik, is unexpectedly heartbreaking, evoking the idiosyncratic spirit of a kind man drowning in a foreign land that has no use for his skills or intellect," writes Rachel Abramowitz, who profiles the actor for the Los Angeles Times.

"Brick Lane is one of those depressing movies in which you catch a glimpse of the tighter, leaner, stronger film that could have been," writes Mark Peikert in the New Press.

Updates, 6/20: "In a perceptive essay on Brick Lane, the literary critic James Wood noted that Ms Ali's novel brings some of the canonical concerns of 19th-century European fiction into a modern multicultural social setting," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "This fusion of an old style with a new reality gives the book its freshness and solidity, but it poses some problems for the film. Ms Gavron, working from a script by Abi Morgan and Laura Jones, veers between understatement and melodrama, and seems unable to convey the inner evolution that is the heart of the story."

"Brick Lane feels something like the Kramer Vs Kramer of Indian domestic issues," writes Tasha Robinson at the AV Club. "[I]t addresses sexual and social freedom rather than divorce and single parenting, but with the same feeling of slowly fumbling through the radical ideas that women are more than humble household servants, and men are more than simple stereotypes. Like Kramer, it can be insultingly timid about these ideas, and given that Indian writer-director Deepa Mehta (Fire, Earth, Water) has covered similar ground more boldly and beautifully, Brick Lane feels slight and late to the table. Still, its pretty musings about small-scale self-actualization can be seductive."

"Too many flashbacks and manufactured confrontations make you wonder whether Ali's book would have made for a better TV miniseries, a format that worked well for Zadie Smith's White Teeth," notes Melissa Anderson in Time Out New York.

"Brick Lane has been whittled down from Monica Ali's expansive 2003 novel into a glossy but overly efficient drama that, like Nazneen's husband, is ultimately too ineffectual to make much of a dent," writes Jan Stuart in the Los Angeles Times.

"The real ace in the hole in Brick Lane is [Tannishtha] Chatterjee," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "On the screen or the soundtrack in nearly every scene, the actress navigates the occasionally strident and heavy-handed nature of Brick Lane with an alternately serene and anxious radiance that spreads into every shadowed corner in the present and nostalgically saturated landscape in the past."

Posted by dwhudson at June 18, 2008 2:12 AM