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DVD Festival: New World Adventures Of The Namesake and Mr. Bean's Holiday

by Jamie Henson
11/27/2007

When characters step into a new world, they can either go through an emotional journey or an adventure that ensures humor from beginning to end. This week, we are graced with the presence of both. Mr. Bean reappears in true fashion with the release of Mr. Bean’s Holiday, and Mira Nair contributes to her already healthy catalog with The Namesake.

Like most of Nair’s films, The Namesake follows the displacement of an Indian family within American culture. The story begins with Ashoke (Irfan Khan) on a train that wrecks as he reads a book by his favorite author, Nikoli Gogol. After his recovery, his marriage is arranged to Ashima (Tabu) in Calcutta, the home she is more than willing to leave for New York. Ashima, once in New York, finds herself in the lonely and despondent American individual culture. She overcomes her loneliness with the company of her son and daughter and other Bengali families.

The story switches from Ashima to her son Gogol (Kal Penn), named after his father’s favorite Russian author. When he goes to college, Gogol changes his name to Nikoli, and soon enough Americanizes it to Nick. Now a complete American with an Indian ancestry, Gogol has an architecture career and a white girlfriend. His discovery is the opposite of his mother's, in which he has to understand and accept his ancestry and begin respecting his traditions.

The film is an adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel of the same title. Nair interprets the book well. If you are culturally empathetic and you want a far better performance from Kal Penn than weed and frat jokes, I suggest you pick up The Namesake.

Also this week Mr. Bean returns as funny as ever in Mr. Bean’s Holiday. I was skeptical, as I’m sure most of you are, to have many of my childhood memories ruined by a re-imagining of Bean. Don’t be.

Rowan Atkinson returns from his showcases (including the very goodBlack Adder and the meh... Johnny English) to get back to slapstick. The movie starts with Bean winning a trip to Cannes during the film festival. Of course, the trip goes wrong from the beginning. After arriving in France, his taxi takes him to the wrong place and he walks through (or over) whatever is in front of him without looking up from his compass. This is the perfect image of Mr. Bean’s self-involved, oblivious mentality that gets him into all of his trouble.

At the station he runs into the film director Carson Clay (Willem Dafoe), a self-centered man who is filming a yogurt commercial with a beautiful actress before his film premiere at Cannes (seemingly unimportant, but actually important info). Also at the station Bean keeps a son from his father by keeping the father off the train as the doors close. His mission changes from not only to get to the beach, but to reunite this boy with his father.

The acting is reasonable all around. Even the kid pulls off facsimiles of the slapstick gags that Atkinson has perfected. If you grew up watching Bean and/or your inner child still giggles at the goofy, pick up Mr. Bean’s Holiday and I promise you won’t be disappointed.