Dinesh Kamath’s column on movie ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ under the title ‘New movie-releases in Navi Mumbai’ that was published in Newsband

New movie-releases in Navi Mumbai

By Dinesh Kamath

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a political thriller film directed by Mira Nair, based on the novel by the same name by Mohsin Hamid, about a Pakistani man working on Wall Street. A Cine Mosaic and Mirabai Films Production, the film stars Kate Hudson, Kiefer Sutherland, Meesha Shafi, Liev Schreiber, Riz Ahmed, Om Puri and Shabana Azmi. The film is produced by Lydia Dean Pilcher.

The movie has an interesting plot. A young Pakistani man graduates from Princeton and chases corporate success on Wall Street. He finds himself embroiled in a conflict between his American Dream, a hostage crisis, and the enduring call of his family's homeland.

The film is anchored in a rustic Lahore teahouse in the near-present, where Changez (Riz Ahmed), a Pakistani-born lecturer who worked on Wall Street for a spell, is interviewed about his life by Bobby Lincoln (Liev Schreiber), an American foreign correspondent.

In Hamid’s book, Changez’s companion remains nameless, but Nair’s film, scripted by William Wheeler from an adapted story by Hamid and Ami Boghani, gives him an identity and a purpose. An American academic has been kidnapped in the region, and the CIA, who are in covert contact with Bobby via an earpiece, are trying to establish whether the disappearance and this charismatic academic are somehow linked.

From Lahore, the film flashes back to Changez’s life in America in the years before the September 11 attacks. He moves from an undergraduate degree at Princeton to a high-flying job at a New York consultancy and starts a relationship with a highly-strung conceptual artist, played by Kate Hudson. It's not, perhaps, the American dream as F. Scott Fitzgerald codified it, but he seems happy enough.

Changez seizes on the opportunities proffered by his foster-country — but when the Towers fall, suspicious eyes track him in the street, and it becomes impossible to pass through airport security ungroped. In the film’s only bold moment, Changez admits to Bobby that what he first felt for the hijackers in his bones was a flash of not anger, but admiration. “The ruthlessness of the act was surpassed only by its genius,” he says.