Watching The Namesake again is like recounting a few favourite memories of your life.  Memories made of the way, Irrfan Khan’s Ashoke runs an anxious finger across his baby Gogol’s little toes, just to make sure he is all there. Or  Ashoke taking Gogol by the hand and walking him to the edge of  the frothing sea, telling him to remember this moment forever. There is Gogol again, his big eyes looking bigger through a glass wall of his parent’s new home in American suburbia.  Gogol, all grown up and Americanised, watching the Taj Mahal with a stunned face on a family holiday.  Gogol, suddenly estranged from the world his parents have brought up in, cutting loose to embrace the freedom that being American brings with it. He is Nikhil, or rather Nick  now and he is closer to his white girl friend’s parents than his own. And yet, the seeds of indoctrinated tradition and the roots linking him to the history of his parents are just below his skin, waiting to sprout at the first opportunity.   
Though Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake was a detailed, evocative account of a Bengali couple’s journey through the American culturescape over a span of thirty years, Meera Nair takes the film far, far beyond the book.
The best kind of cinema as the Bengali masters taught us, blurs the line between the imagined and the lived. With The Namesake, Nair goes beyond anything she has ever done before to create the detail, the warmth, the pathos, the expanse of a lifetime in  one film. 
Whether it is Ashoke cajoling his homesick wife out of the bathroom with a lullaby or she cradling him at night when he has woken up with a start or Ashima painstakingly sticking sequins on handmade greeting cards to send back home, or the camera lingering on the disorientating airport graphics when the family is going back to Kolkata to mourn Ashima’s father’s death or the quiet, sweet goodbye Ashoke bids his wife on his way to a lecturership in a new city, the helpless terror she feels in her lonely home when a phone call changes her life, Gogol’s painful journey back into the family’s fold, the teeming streets of Kolkata, there is so much to see and absorb and feel in this film. It is impossible to take it all in one viewing. This film like a good book will require many return journeys to be fully appreciated. The book may have been  about dilemmas of immigration but the film has a universal poignancy which may just take it to the Oscars next year.
What can one say about Irrfan Khan? There is very little for him to do in this film and dear God, look what he does with the cinematic space he is given. His love-filled eyes as he nods a goodbye to his wife on a busy airport, his halting narration of the story behind why he named his son Gogol, his discomfort when his son’s girlfriend kisses him, his sense of wonder when he first touches his first born, are moments made of pure emotion. Tabu is Tabu like always. Hugely expressive and unbelievably natural in a few scenes and just a notch short of blinding brilliance in others because she is laidback to a fault.  Despite being draped in layered Kanthas and bulky overcoats, she however radiates the beauty and dignity of a woman who has lived through great love and greater loss. Kal Penn is a revelation and you realize that Nair has integrated her actors so much with the characters they play that they ring true even in those exquisite moments of silence and grief that make this film so special. The film belongs to Nair, her screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala and cinematographer Frederick Elmes and together they create a montage of images one cannot shake off, days after you have seen the film. The film does not have a pat ending and we do not know if Gogol/Nikhil found a way to unify his Indian identity with his American aspirations but we do know that life like Ashoke’s favourite quote is about shaking off the blanket of security and traveling light through the world.It is about making the world your home and never forgetting the home that was once your world.