Movie Reviews

The Film

‘The Namesake’ is a mediocre film based on an equally middling eponymous novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize winning London born author of Indian descent. It is a coming of age story of an ABCD by “another badly confused Deshi” (ABCD - Lahiri) [Washington Post]

The novel traces the story of Gogol Ganguli, son of first generation Indian immigrants - Ashoke and Ashima – presented in the movie as cardboard characters, whose one-dimensional struggles superfluously adorn the movie –and his struggle to come to terms with his cross-cultural identity. Gogol goes through various expected phases of someone shooing away a psychological ghost - unexpressed anger, rebelliousness, and then rapprochement that comes at the behest of his father’s unexpected death and later through his wife’s infidelity. While the issues are real, they seem to have been frozen and then perfunctorily staked over by an inane screenplay by Nair’s usual collaborator - her Harvard peer Sooni Taporevala. It appears that by trying to cram in too much – a bi-generational story - it fails to do justice to any of the stories.

Samosas, Rasogullas, and Indian Relatives

Nair captures the perversities of an immigrant’s life with great humor and great eye for detail. We get to sit in the endless uncle-aunty parties full of Bengali food, and watch as our little ABCDs squirm when talked to by the way ‘uncool’ uncle and aunties. We get to see how the American raised children take in the soot laden, chaotic Indian cities and the clinging relatives on their visits to India. Of course the Indian relatives themselves remain caricatures of humans.

Gogol wants his overcoat back

Gogol’s overcoat has been done a disservice. Much like the name of Virgnia Woolf was expropriated by the mediocre and unrelated epoynomous play, “Who is afraid of Virgina Woolf?”, Lahiri leans on the exoticness of Gogol to rescue her. Lahiri doesn’t have the intellectual depth to even throw in a line about why Russian authors were popular in India. Gogol’s deeply ironical and existentialist short story Overcoat becomes a peg on which Lahiri tries to hang ‘the namesake’, Gogol Ganguli’s pretentious superfluous problems.

Visual Metaphor and Nair

The Atlantic Ocean shimmers exhibiting a grey luminescence; the humid chaos of Calcutta streets is viscerally alive; and the forlorn winter landscape of New York, marked by decay, stoically real. Mira Nair is a master auteur. She has an astute eye for capturing the elemental affective truth of a place. Nair is also edacious. While she has a wonderful aesthetic eye, she uses it with the indulgence of a nouveau aesthete. Nair unhesitatingly and unfailingly puts her camera in front of every scar, every photogenic shot, and includes it.

Editing: Weaving a tapestry with unusual neighbors

The movie has been edited in a way that provides for abrupt transitions between different environments. It appears to be a deliberate strategy to highlight the often times almost schizophrenic existence of an immigrant in multiple environments, and continuation and disruption that characters feel as they straddle (or travel between) different microcosms.

General Tommy Franks described the media as the “fourth front” in his (Iraq) war plan, according to Danny Schechter, an award winning journalist and documentary filmmaker.
What he meant by that was that winning the “media war” is an important part of winning the war in Iraq. Three years down the line with US stuck in an ever-worsening situation, we all know what happens when governments win the media war and succumb to their hubris.

Independent Intervention, a documentary by Norwegian filmmaker Tonje Hessen Schei, is superficially an exploration of how the Iraq war was fought on the “fourth front” in US media. On a deeper level, it is a well crafted expose’ of the effects of media conglomeration on the style, topicality and quality of news.

Schei begins her documentary with a series of heartrending images from Iraq, images that were never shown on mainstream American media. This initial sequence provides the preface to her documentary- the Iraq war shown on the television screens of Americans was a very different from the one being fought in Iraq. Schei, stuck by the jingoistic, bleached (of the horrors of war), video game like coverage of Iraq war in US mainstream media, explores the reasons behind how and why mainstream American media became a willing partner in government’s propaganda machine helping it wage the war for the hearts and minds of American public. Using footage from the war and interviews with people luminaries like Dr. Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman and others, Schei persuasively argues that a majority of what went wrong during media’s coverage of Iraq war can be traced to corporate media ownership.

The documentary does a stupendous job in tracing media’s coverage of Iraq war starting with the pre-war buildup by effectively using some well known statistics, for example about how during the two week period around which Colin Powell gave his speech at UN and during a time when more than half of the people opposed war, and– out of the 393 people who were interviewed on the four major nightly network newscasts – NBC, ABC, CBS and PBS only a meager 3% held antiwar views while a stunning 71% were pro war.

Independent Intervention is simply scintillating when it weaves snippets from local morning news shows to convey a point. It is jarring to see archival news footage of anti-war protests highlighting mundane inconveniences caused by protestors - “simply creating chaos during rush hour” or “protestors shut down the financial district in San Francisco” and sneeringly ignore to give time to explaining why protestors were against the war.

Independent Intervention explores how merger of showbiz and “newsbiz” has had a damning impact on the way news is covered. In their effort to attract consumers, news shows have ramped up their production values to match those in entertainment. The ever shrinking sound bite has limited what can be conveyed intelligibly to the audience and hence all that is complicated is left at the curb. So while reporting on the Iraq war, the ethnic complexities are left out.

Schei though is never is able to purposefully include some information in the documentary. For example, we are informed that five corporations - Vivendi, Disney, Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom -own eighty percent of media but yet are left in the dark about how and why it affects media coverage in the way it does. Perhaps the critique is implicit but it is limited to corporate control (economics fudging the news) and not to effects of agglomeration.

Media is an important institution for democracy – a tool through which we understand the world and the world understands us. (Goodman) We need to keep the media free and independent for we need good unbiased and uncensored information for a functioning democracy. And lastly and perhaps most importantly, media should never be confused as a tool of war.

Overall, Independent Intervention can be seen as part of the genre of documentaries inspired by Michael Moore – a genre of unabashedly political documentaries with an agenda, but its wider message – that of need for independent media - would be of interest to both liberals and conservatives.

The DVD of the film is available at http://www.independentintervention.com