JHUMPA LAHIRI’S THE Namesake had been on my to-do list for years: a should-read, an “edifying” experience that I’d get to after I made that trip to the gym. Well, now I know better—it’s not work to read this book. It’s awe. It’s sitting back and just absorbing the skill, and craft, and beauty.

The Namesake tells a story we’ve probably all heard before: an immigrant family bestows upon a child a “horrible” name that gets him teased and picked on. (It can be a name, a custom, a cuisine, a style of speech—the archetype remains the same.) In adulthood, however, after a childhood of resentment, the true, poignant meaning behind the name is revealed, and the two generations come together in understanding. In this case, Bengali émigré Ashoke Ganguli names his son for the absurdist Russian author Nikolai Gogol, and only years later does Gogol come to realize the power behind that name, for his father and his family.

The story’s arc is tissue-subtle. A series of events unfold in the lives of this family—it’s life, but the links that pull it together as a story are loose at best: man marries woman, takes her to a foreign land. They have a baby, then another, the children grow up and negotiate their own lives, loves and vocations. The full-circleness of it never really materializes; the conflicts are almost entirely personal, and we get no real moments of resolution or triumph. It’s just … life. And in the hands of a lesser writer, the novel would have fallen apart.

Movies, in general, with their clear beginnings and endings, their camera tricks and definite moments of epiphany and resolution—they don’t lend themselves well to novelistic ambiguity. And so I came away from reading The Namesake wondering how the hell they could possibly make it into a film.

They couldn’t. Not even close. What they can do, and what director Mira Nair has done, however, is put together a similar tale, one that touches on all the basic points. A paler copy, but one that is ultimately sweet in its own, simpler way.

So much of the original story is internal—thoughts, feelings, motivations, frustrations. But movies are by nature external, all about dialogue, and that’s where this translation suffers: this level of self-examination is acceptable when it’s kept inside, but when these thoughts are put into characters’ mouths, self-awareness becomes navel-gazing. The Namesake is about divergence—how people can perceive the same situations wildly differently, filtered through their own experiences, upbringing, gender, or generation, and how this divergence can cause chasms that seem insurmountable. The characters don’t have the words to explain, and so these things just don’t get explained, and the reader is left to feel the pain of this lack, the characters’ own pain.

But the film tries to give voice to these unvoiceable sentiments, and the act of speaking them aloud makes them trite. If you are perfectly capable of communicating your feelings, the whole basis for misunderstanding—and the pathos it generates—is lost. To then persist in misunderstanding feels contrived.

Gogol’s two love interests suffer the most from this. In the film, Gogol (Kal Penn) tells the first girlfriend, blonde American Maxine (Jacinda Barrett), exactly how she should behave around his conservative Bengali parents. She blithely ignores this, shaking their hands, kissing both his mother and father on the cheeks, and calling them by their first names, invading their space. She’s presented to us in clear violation of these clear-cut rules, so that her transgression reduces her character to the typical clueless, careless American, a film trope that’s rapidly losing its effectiveness with constant repetition.

In contrast, the book describes her: “Maxine is immune to their awkwardness, drawing them out, devoting her attention to them fully, and Gogol is reminded of the first time he’d met her, when she’d seduced him in the same way.” Although the meeting is no less awkward, the difference in culture is simply described, and no one party is faulted. The film version clearly lays blame on Maxine, painting her as a cultural boor. It’s an understandable visual shorthand, but the richness of the scene is simplified and lost.

The character who gets the worst of these shortcuts is the woman who eventually becomes Gogol’s wife. Transplanted from Indian to British to American culture, Moushimi Mazumdar (Zuleikha Robinson) as a child defended herself against her world by constructing a barricade of haughty books and belligerently posh language, growing awkwardly up from nerdy little duckling to sexy, self-assured, bespectacled swan.

Moushimi trades her affected British accent for a Ph.D. in French literary theory and a sojourn in Paris, and the novel clearly lays out that French is, for her, a path to freedom and self-definition. Her total immersion into this foreign tongue lets her reinvent herself, decide who she wants to be and how she wants to be perceived, free of the dueling constraints of both American and Bengali. Moushimi has found a third way, but Gogol, without realizing it, drags her back into his own Indian-American dichotomy.

But in the film, Moushimi’s attitude and eventual affair is interpreted as simple contempt for her heritage instead of as her struggle to self-identify. She’s the bitchy, self-centered wife … and that’s pretty much it. Her obsession with French culture and literature is reduced to the cheesy French pop tune on her cell phone, used to signify her duplicity and snobbery as she takes calls from her lover—speaking French, of course, so that her poor, sheltered mother-in-law will not catch on—and making her seem like more like a teenage wannabe than a well-educated, well-traveled grown-up.

Even the film’s talented star, Kal Penn, has hurdles to overcome, partly because he should not be playing a teenager. Never for an instant does he resemble anything other than a twentysomething man, and the pettiness and self-centeredness you can forgive in a young teen is grating and borderline ridiculous in an adult. The eye-rolling, the sighing, the “whatever, Dad”—it’s too teenybopper, too Dawson’s Creek, and a waste of his considerable talents. As an adult, however, he more than earns back his sympathy—his discomforts are truly cringeworthy, and his pain heartbreaking. After his completely wordless turn in Superman Returns, I sincerely hope that this role opens better doors for him. (I won’t talk about Epic Movie if you don’t.) His performance here is proof he can handle tougher material.

But it’s veteran actors Irfan Khan and Tabu as parents Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli who are the standouts. Tabu in particular just resonates—so believable at every age, from uncertain bride to self-assured mother, but maintaining a fragility, always with the vulnerability of a stranger in a strange land. The film begins and ends with her rich, lilting singing, perfectly bracketing a tale that has and needs no true end. She owns her role.

On a second viewing, with more time and distance from the source material, this movie hangs together pretty well. It’s not got the depth, but it retains nearly all of the affection for its subjects. Overall, there’s a comforting, mellow vibe to the film, cohesive and satisfying. There are plenty of far less worthwhile offerings out there clamoring for two hours of your time. This one is definitely worth a view.

The Namesake (PG-13) opened on March 9.

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