At times it feels like we're on a box-ticking rush to compress decades' worth of momentous life events into a couple of hours. But at the same time, it's difficult to ever completely escape the feeling that you're watching a film of a novel. There are seismic changes and domestic upheavals ahead, of course, and the film covers impressive spans of time, distance and emotion without reaching a hysterical pitch or melting into an ooze of sentimental mush. Gogol is played by the likable Indian-American Kal Penn, who's made his career to date playing his ethnicity for laughs, notably in the stoner comedy Harold and Kumar Get the Munchies, and whose real name is Kalpen Suresh Modi. By college, Gogol is calling himself "Nick", dating a Waspy blonde and spending all his time with her family, discussing truffles and New England architecture while Ashima awaits his calls at home. The reasons Ashok chose this name are eventually explained in one of the film's key scenes, but the significance it has for the father is lost on the son, who has grown up as a typical pot-smoking, loud-music-playing American teenager - except with a dumb name. When the hospital requires a name for the birth certificate, the parents are taken by surprise and volunteer his pet name, "Gogol". But the real battle takes place with their son, whose identity is an issue from the moment he is born. Added to which she's stranded in an alien world where even making a meal or doing the laundry is a challenge. When she travels to 1970s New York with him soon after, her husband, played by Irfan Khan, last seen in The Warrior, is still a stranger to her. Before meeting Ashok, the husband her parents have arranged for her, the mother, Ashima, played by Tabu, furtively tries on his shoes (emblazoned "Made in USA") outside. Identity and integration are at the core of the story. But here's a story that's firmly in her territory: an adaptation of Jumpha Lahiri's true-to-life novel, following two generations of a Bengali family in New York.
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But their paths keep crossing with both comic and painfully revelatory consequences… until Gogol begins to see the links between the world his parents left behind and the new world that lies in front of him.Since Monsoon Wedding, Mira Nair has looked like a director operating a little too far outside her comfort zone - with her hit-and-miss Vanity Fair adaptation and before that, a glum TV movie called Hysterical Blindness set in 1980s New Jersey. As Gogol attempts to forge his destiny – rejecting his given name, dating a rich American girl, heading to study architecture at Yale – his parents cling to their Bengali traditions. As a first-generation American teenager, Gogol must learn to tread a razor-thin line between his Bengali roots and his American birthright in the search for his own identity.
But life isn’t as easy for Gogol as his parents might wish. Under pressure to name him quickly, Ashoke settles on Gogol (Kal Penn), after the famous Russian author – a name that serves as a link to a secret past and, Ashoke hopes, a better future. Virtual strangers to one another and with Ashima now living in a new and very strange land, their relationship quickly takes a turn when Ashima gives birth to a son.
On the heels of their arranged marriage, Ashoke (Irrfan Khan) and Ashima (Tabu) jet off from sweltering Calcutta to a wintry New York where they begin their new life together.
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