The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Brave epic questions capitalism
A slightly unwieldy version of Moshin Hamid’s bestseller, but the film remains a subtle examination of our difficult times.
“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 — 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, as played by Ahmed, a British actor and rap artist, 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, Changez goes to the U.S. to attend Princeton University and make his fortune.
He emerges as a cleancut 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. Cross is played with sly urbanity by Kiefer Sutherland, who brings to the table another unstated piece of cultural baggage, 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), a journalist doing a story on the recent kidnapping of an American professor.
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. Director Mira Nair, whose experience in these crosscultural environments (The Perez Family, Mississippi Marsala), can’t stop her from underlining every paradox.
Changez’s story is one of the American dream, even though his character will later wonder if there is a Pakistani dream, at least one that doesn’t involve emigration. His job is to study companies for inefficiencies and then recommend firing its workers.
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 Hud- son as a brunette), an artist mourning a dead lover. Changez 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 inci- dent 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.
Just as the Twin Towers attacks make Americans more American, so they make him more Pakistani, and in response he grows a beard and begins to question his true identity. 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.
The film moves from a sterile America to the lively, impoverished Muslim world (the smooth cinematography is by Declan Quinn) in a clamour of bracing music.
It’s all structured like a thriller, 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.