Film

In adapting Jhumpa Lahiri’s best-selling book-group staple, Nair and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala face two big challenges. First, the reading public is going to quibble about the casting, the look, the pacing and any changes, however minor, that have been made. Fans of the novel will be pleased with the film. But the second challenge may be the greater one; Lahiri’s novel sprawls across 20-some years. Taraporevala’s script is less successful on this ground, reduced to beginning scene after scene with exposition to catch us up (“Well, it’s been several months since you moved out. How are you?”).

The film follows the lives of the Ganguli family from Calcutta to New York. In the mid-1970s, Ashoke (Khan) enters into an arranged marriage with Ashima (Tabu), and whisks her off to America, where he is pursuing graduate study. Nair and Taraporevala are at their best in this section, conveying the hard adjustment Ashima faces.

But the focus of the film shifts to the Gangulis’s son Gogol (named for his father’s favorite author), played expressively by Penn (Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle). Gogol, like many children of immigrants, straddles two cultures. He has to choose between the trappings of American life and the customs and values of his parents. Penn conveys this quite well, and individual scenes are moving. We just wish the film didn’t feel quite so much like it was struggling to cram in all the plot from the novel.