Ordinary little film, big-picture lesson

THERE were only half a dozen people in the large emptiness of the Laemmle Theatre the night I saw the movie “The Namesake.” The size of the room not only emphasized lack of interest in the film but also suggested how into ourselves Americans are.

Although there are changes in our isolationist attitudes, we still tend to scoff at or ignore the offerings of other cultures unless they are presented in the guise of “humor,” as was the crude, inane “Borat,” cinematic trash that won our hearts with its bagfuls of mockery and scatology.

What distinguished “The Namesake” was not high drama or moments of obvious theatrical tugs but its very mundanity. It is in many ways an ordinary movie about ordinary people living ordinary lives, even as you and I do.

One might argue that sitting through two hours of a work that features neither a gunfight nor a car chase runs contrary to our usual interests. No heads blasted open? Nope. No frontal nudity? Nope. No horror, no savagery, no breathtaking stunts? Nope, nope and nope. Not even animation.

What we have in “The Namesake” is a couple from Calcutta establishing their lives in the United States, clinging to their ways while adapting to ours. A spectrum from birth to death is encapsulated in the story of the Ganguli family, whose visceral tribulations could have been those of just about anyone’s family.

We see the ritual of an arranged marriage, the birth of two children, the difficulties of their growing up, the pain of deception in the boy’s marriage and the anguish of departure in the father’s death. Although arranged marriages aren’t among our national traits, the movement of a family through years of ups and downs otherwise reflects what most families endure.

We all need the protection of one another, we need someone to care about, we need the strength of a soft touch when adversity darkens our lives, and we need someone to share our elation when success brightens our moments.

“The Namesake” is an emotional journey played from the perspective of four people whose connections to their homeland remain strong while they seek new identities in New York. Their hopes are intrinsic to their existence, their fears relative to their setbacks. As they travel back and forth on visits to Calcutta, we come to understand the necessity of roots and the gradual acceptance of a background that the American-born children hardly know. Their history comes upon them slowly and gently, like the morning of a warm day.

We seem to be going through a climate of dismissal or perhaps even deep hostilities toward one another in America. Although there might not have been hatred involved in Don Imus’ insult, which he says was just humor gone bad, it constitutes but one more instance of a superiority complex that lies beneath the surface of our constitutional spirit of egalitarianism.

What we don’t seem to get is that what we want in America is what the people want in India and Iraq and Denmark and Italy and China and Russia. Beyond the flags we wave and the national anthems we sing are the composite figures of humanity who share similar needs and similar skeletons. Our true connections are elemental, not ethnic or racial. We are joined at the soul on the blue globe we occupy.

Seeing movies like “The Namesake” reminds me of what I have learned in years of travel to many of the places I mentioned. Scenes from visits to other countries and other cultures continue to paint pictures in my head of the actions that characterize our race of humans. I see women shopping at open markets, touching the fruit to test their quality. I see men on scaffolds painting a new office building. I see children playing catch in the street. I see families picnicking under the branches of shade trees in a park.

The scenes are unremarkable, which is an element of their glory. They are us in our various modes of daily living, and they are the same on a side street in Prague as they are at a farmers market in Santa Monica; the same at a building under construction in Wuhan as they are in Woodland Hills; the same at a park in Oslo as they are in Watts. While languages might change, laughter is universal, and so is sorrow.

I hadn’t meant to sermonize today but simply to point out some familiar aspects of a “foreign” film, some gentle stuff that binds us to each other. I’m not going to fool myself into believing that a movie is going to change anyone a lot, but perhaps it might at least stimulate our thinking processes as we ponder the basic similarities in our species and the shallow depths of our cultural differences.

The message that might emerge from “The Namesake” is that when we’re trashing others, we’re trashing ourselves, and when we kill one another on fields of combat, we are killing ourselves, and that’s a strange and terrible concept to consider.

Al Martinez’s column runs Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez @latimes.com.