Director Mira Nair (Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, The Namesake) brings the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist to the screen. A young Pakistani man flourishes at Princeton and on Wall Street, and he becomes an American Master of the Universe. But then September 11 changes his world, as Americans reacting and overreacting to terror start treating him badly. Suddenly, he no longer sees a fit with his American girlfriend, a flighty, overprivileged artist. He returns to Pakistan to teach in a university, and becomes an intellectual leader for Pakistanis seeking to resist the West. The movie becomes a thriller when the question arises, has he become a terrorist?
The thriller works – if you haven’t read the novel, you don’t know whether the guy we’ve been rooting for is or is not a terrorist until the final minutes. The best thing about the movie is the remarkably intense performance of British actor Riz Ahmed as the protagonist. Ahmed is a compelling screen presence, and he clearly has impressive acting range when you contrast his hyper-alert role here with the dim terrorist he played in the hilarious terrorist parody Four Lions. As one would expect, Liev Schreiber is also excellent as the guy who must determine whether Ahmed has become a terrorist.
What didn’t work for me? First there was the odd choice of Kate Hudson as the girlfriend. The character is just too vapid to captivate a Wall Street whiz kid, and Hudson just doesn’t project the sensuality to make up the difference for a guy in his early 20s.
The story also suggests that non-violent, democratic nationalism can have widespread appeal in Pakistan, and, while I would hope that Pakistanis embrace that path, I’m not sure that it’s a likely outcome.
If you need a sermon on the blowback from our War on Terror, then you can sit in the pew for The Reluctant Fundamentalist. But, for an ambiguous thriller, Homeland is a better choice.