I love the novel The Namesake. And while this movie is very beautiful, I don't think the adaptation does the novel justice. What it lacks is time. The joy of reading Jhumpa Lahiri is inhabiting the lives of her characters. You can't do that in a two hour movie that had to cut out all the character development, some of the most touching scenes from the novel. It doesn't even fully explain the traditional naming process that encounters a hitch when grandma dies. Such a sprawling story makes adaptation difficult. I know you can't expect a perfect 1:1 translation, but I think I loved the novel too much to be satisfied with anything less. Irrfan Khan and Tabu are precisely what I envisioned in my head. Kal Penn not so much, but he may never escape Harold and Kumar.
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