Review of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2013) by Thegodfatherson — 15 May 2013

“I love America,” says Changez Khan (Riz Ahmed), the conflicted hero of Mira Nair’s outsider love story The Reluctant Fundamentalist. But does he really? Changez whose very name encloses the many layers of irony that the movie peels back with the greedy appetite of a thirsty man eating an orange is a Muslim from Pakistan who embraces capitalism, then learns that it may not have room for “the other” in its black, acquisitive heart.

Changez himself isn’t that much of a bargain either, although as played by Ahmed, a British actor and rap artist, he is appealing enough that we root for him even as he enacts the Punjab version of Wall Street.

The son of a famous poet (a delicate cameo by Om Puri) whose fortunes are fading into the crude melting pot of callous capitalism that becomes another of the film’s symbols, Changez goes to the U.S.

to attend Princeton University and make his fortune. He emerges as a clean-cut Ivy League go-getter who talks his way into a job with a Wall Street company run by Jim Cross, one of those smooth corporate tough guys whose bottom line is the bottom line.

Cross is played with sly urbanity by Kiefer Sutherland, who brings to the table another unstated piece of cultural baggage he was the anti-terrorist fighter in 24, after all that at times threatens to sink The Reluctant Fundamentalist under the weight of its own metaphors.

The movie is told in flashback: Changez, now a bearded professor in Lahore, is being questioned by Bobby Lincoln (Liev Schreiber, properly grizzled and sporting a name that could probably get him elected president), a journalist doing a story on the recent kidnapping of an American professor.

Sutherland and Puri steal the show, with gritty and hooking performances. Changez may or may not be involved, just as Lincoln may or may not be more than he seems: The Reluctant Fundamentalist operates on several levels, all of them called out like elevator stops by director Mira Nair, whose experience in these cross-cultural environments (The Perez Family, Mississippi Marsala) can’t stop her from underlining every paradox.

He turns out to be very good at this task; Jim, his boss, supposes it’s because he’s an outsider, although this thread is left unexamined in the film. He also finds love in the person of Erica (Kate Hudson, a little chunkier than we remember but looking good as a brunette), an artist mourning a dead lover.

Chavez becomes both a replacement and an exotic accessory, “the ultimate downtown status symbol,” he later realizes. Erica, of course, is just “America” without one syllable. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is structured around the defining incident of our times.

In New York after 9/11, Changez finds himself on the outside of society despite his capitalist credentials. Nair presents some nicely underplayed scenes Changez being searched at an airport in a silent humiliation, for instance that help us read his new look of confusion.

It’s all structured like a thriller, with a group of American intelligence forces about to pounce on Changez, but this is a superfluous bit of plot-making; The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a small personal story, based on a novel by Mohsin Hamid, that has been inflated into an unwieldy epic.

It’s a brave one, though, that dares to look through unfamiliar eyes at what we thought we knew about religious fundamentalists and capitalist fundamentals. Just as the Twin Towers attack make Americans more American, so they make him more Pakistani, and in response he grows a beard and begins to question his true identity.

“It makes me who I am,” he says. Just who that is becomes the film’s mystery. In a startling scene, Changez allows a smile of admiration to cross his face after the 9/11 attacks,. “David had struck Goliath,” he says, and it secretly thrills him even as it challenges us.