A feverish ‘Hamlet’ with Riz Ahmed'

  I’d been looking forward to Riz Ahmed’s Hamlet, a new interpretation of Shakespeare’s classic play directed by Aneil Karia, a director who had won an Oscar for his short film, The Long Goodbye, a harrowing take on an encounter between a South Asian family and right-wing racists.

  To set the stage, let me say that I don’t insist that Shakespeare be approached with liturgical reverence. Why not set a big-screen adaptation in an East Asian community in contemporary London? And instead of royalty, how about centering the play on corporate big shots vying for control of (ready for it?) the Elsinore corporation?

  Karia also takes liberties with Shakespeare’s dialogue, giving certain speeches to characters who didn’t deliver them in the original. I guess that’s OK. too. 

   After all, this lean one-hour and 53-minute rendition of Hamlet has been given a modernist edge that includes a foray into a nightclub where Hamlet snorts cocaine, an activity that seems superfluous for an already amped up prince who might be wobbling on the edge of insanity.

   Artistic license notwithstanding, some things in this bleary, agitated fever dream of a Hamlet seem like self-inflicted errors. Timothy Spall plays Polonius but the character's pompous cautionary speech to his son Laertes (Joe Alwyn), has been scrapped. (“Neither a borrower nor lender be.”)  

   If you're familiar with the play, you'll find other  such omissions in a work that writer Michael Lesslie adapted for the screen..

   Those who see this version of Hamlet may welcome seeing Ahmed deliver Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy behind the wheel of a BMW that’s racing on a rainy highway. It suggests that a reckless Hamlet might actually stop being at any moment. 

   But I wanted to focus  I wanted to focus on Hamlet's speech without worrying about the fact that Hamlet, at one point, takes his hands off the steering wheel while driving on the wrong side of the road.

  A dance number recreates the play in which Hamlet stages his view of the way Claudius (Art Malik) bumped off Hamlet’s dad so that he could marry his mom, Gertrude (an excellent Sheeba Chaddah),  and take over a corporate kingdom.

 Maybe it’s me, but much of the dialogue seemed mumbled, and Ahmed’s performance leans heavily on half-crazed anger. It's almost as if Hamlet is  being devoured by revenge-seeking demons.

   Karia's invention tends to de-emphasize Shakespeare’s language. And as much as anything, isn't the spoken word the point?

   Viewing this risk-riddled Hamlet can feel a bit like buying a ticket to hear your favorite musical group only to discover that it won’t be performing the tunes that made you love them in the first place. 

   You get why they wanted to branch out, but sometimes, the old tunes are better.

    

Bob's Cinema Diary: Nov. 3, 2023 -- 'The Persian Version' and 'Fingernails'

The Persian Version

 

Though light-hearted, The Persian Version deals with serious issues pertaining to fragmented cultural identity and generational disconnection. Say this: Director Maryam Keshavarz isn't afraid to extend her reach. Early on we learn that Leila (Layla Mohammadi) has arrived at a point of friction with her immigrant mother (Niousha Noor). A fully contemporary young woman,  Leila aspires to be a screen writer. After breaking up with her gay wife  (Mia Foo), Leila becomes pregnant from a one-night fling with an actor (Tom Byrne) who's working in a stage production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Keshavarz also tells the story of Leila's mother, a determined woman who willed herself to succeed in America, becoming a business success when her physician husband (Bijan Daneshmand) was sidelined with heart issues.  Mom, the movie's most interesting character, has a backstory. She married at 14 while still in Iran. More complex and demanding than you might expect from a film that strives to leave a feel-good aftertaste, Mom's story could have been its own film. A strong Kamand Shafieisabet plays Mom as a young woman. Scattered as it can be and perhaps with too much on its plate, the Persian Version breaks into enough enjoyable pieces to sustain a 107-minute entertainment.

Fingernails

   Christos Nikou, known for directing Apples, a 2020 festival favorite, has lots going for him in Fingernails, a movie that involves an unwieldy and alarming conceit. 

   In the near future, someone has invented a device that analyzes fingernails to determine whether two people are a love match. Billed as a kind of marriage insurance, the procedure requires ripping out fingernails, a torment Nikou may have seen as the basis for a meaningful metaphor. 

 Stay calm: Nikou suggests more than he shows.

 But let's get back to the movie's strengths, which are concentrated in three names: Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, and Jeremy Allen White, familiar from the hit series Bear. 

  Buckley plays Anna, a vaguely unhappy woman who takes a job with a company that tries to teach people how to love one another before submitting to the test that will determine whether they belong together. 

  A teacher by trade, Anna yearns for something that's missing from her marriage to White's Ryan, a dependable guy who no longer lights the spark of romance in their relationship.

 Ahmed plays Amir, one of Anna's co-workers, a lonely guy who slowly falls for her. The two share experiences helping couples at the Love Institute, a firm presided over by Luke Wilson's Duncan. 

   The movie sets up a conflict between emotional allure and "scientific" verification with Buckley and Ahmed giving performances that ripple with attraction and intelligence. 

   Their chemistry almost covers the contrived nature of the central conceit,  presumably intended to satirize the ridiculous notion that matters of the heart can come with guarantees.

   But the whole fingernail business also can feel like a gimmick that challenges credibility, and perhaps even common sense. That’s how I lean.

A vet battles alien microbes — and PTSD

 

Somewhere in Encounter, there's a good movie, but -- as the saying goes -- I'm not sure director Michael Pearce found it. Riz Ahmed plays a former Marine who has seen too much combat and decides that he must rescue his two sons (Lucian-River Chauhan and Aditya Geddada) from being infected by an alien invasion that has arrived in the form of "non-terrestrial microbes." Ahmed's Malik snatches his two sons from their mother and stepfather and begins a road trip. Ahmed (Sound of Metal) engages as a man who either is a super-protective father or an emotionally damaged vet suffering from terrible PTSD. The young actors hold up their ends and Pearce offers up some impressive images. Octavia Spencer signs on as the parole officer for Ahmed's Malik. He'd been in jail for striking an officer and was dishonorably discharged from the surface. As the story progresses, we learn more about Malik's history. But the movie begins as a sci-fi thriller and morphs into something else, leaving it to us to find the proper point of view from which to see the movie's increasingly tense events. The most touching thing about Encounter involves watching two young people trying to figure out their father's strange behavior. Overall, though, a missed opportunity.

The wild and strange west

The Sisters Brothers tells the story of hitmen siblings.

Some Westerns aim to uphold frontier mythology; others want to drag that mythology into the muddy grit of reality. And some don't necessarily want to do either. The Sisters Brothers seems to fit into that latter category; it's a strangely entertaining, slightly off-kilter take on the American West during a time of transition.

The Sisters Brothers (Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly) are hitmen who work for a ruthless character known as the Commodore (Rutger Hauer). But these two gunmen are not like other gunfighters you've seen before. They're more brutal than slick and they banter and argue as only siblings can.

Based on a novel by Patrick deWitt, The Sister's Brothers takes French director Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone, Dheepan and The Prophet) to the northwestern US -- Oregon mostly -- to follow the twisted adventures of brothers who have developed a proud level of expertise in their chosen occupation.

Not surprisingly, the brothers aren't always on the same page. Brother Eli (Reilly) has grown weary of killing people. He longs for the tenderness of home and hearth. He wants to retire. Brother Charlie sees no reason to quit, so long as the Commodore keeps giving them lucrative assignments.

Perhaps to let us know that we're not about to take a customary Western ride, Audiard begins his movie with a gunfight that takes place in the dark. Flashes from fired weapons pop across the screen along with the deep-throated sound of firing revolvers. If you're interested in assigning meaning to this battle, it might have something to do with Charlie and Eli's aimlessness. They're acting out an old script, but they have no real vision about what they might be pursuing. They're dancing in the dark.

The story soon focuses on the task to which Charlie and Eli currently have been assigned. They're supposed to catch up with Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed) and torture him for reasons best discovered in a theater.

For their part, the brothers are task-specific; they've been hired to torture; it's not their job to locate the fleeing Warm. That task falls into the hands of John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) a detective whose impeccable diction couldn't seem more out of place in this environment.

As it turns out, Warm has a large agenda: He wants to found a harmonious, non-violent, egalitarian society in Dallas, Texas, and damn if Morris doesn't catch a bit of utopian fever himself.

The performances are marked by idiosyncratic fervor. Phoenix portrays Charlie as a drunk with a quick temper and a taste for life without regret. Reilly gives Eli a dogged quality with hints of unexpected tenderness. A shawl Eli carries with him serves as a kind of security blanket, a reminder that the comfort of a woman might exist somewhere, although it's probably somewhere where Eli isn't.

One of my favorite moments arrives when Charlie asks Eli why he insists on carrying around a scarf he purportedly was given by a woman. It's not a scarf insists Eli; it's a shawl. To him, the distinction means everything.

Audiard sets all this against the backdrop of the still-evolving west. At one point, Morris -- who keeps a diary -- notes that he's visiting settlements that didn't exist three months ago. In another signal of change, Charlie discovers the toothbrush, a device that he uses awkwardly. Think about it. How would you approach a toothbrush if you'd never seen one before?

Audiard allows what symbolism he employs to crawl out of the natural landscape. On the trail, a sleeping Eli swallows a spider that leaves him sick and poisoned. His face becomes distorted and swollen with bloat. The natural world seems to be turning against Eli.

I won't reveal the movie's ending but I'll tell you that Audiard allows his movie to settle like a pot that has been taken off the fire and has begun to lose its boiling fury. Audiard has given us a half-real, half-fantastical portrait of the West, putting it on the shoulders of two brothers who only seem unconstrained by their torments when their horses are bounding across open terrain. As the movie suggests, the West may not be what we once thought it was, but the image of horse and rider hasn't lost its power to stir.

War? What's it good for? A 'Star Wars' movie that pits rebels against the Death Star

Rogue One may stand alone, but it doesn't stand above the best Star Wars movies.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story takes place at a time when The Empire, imperial source of all evil, is in the process of constructing a Death Star, a weapon so powerful it can destroy entire planets.

As familiar as that may sound, Rogue One turns out to be a slightly different kind of Star Wars adventure. Production notes for the movie describe it as a stand-alone effort -- albeit one that's meant to fit into the Star Wars universe.

Led by director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Monsters), the Disney team takes us on a less-than-epic tour of a darkly hued Star Wars world. We meet a ragtag group of rebels that fights the massive Empire, but the movie mostly takes the twinkle out of Star Wars' eyes, opting instead for a battle-heavy extravaganza with stunt-and-grunt impact.

Felicity Jones plays Jyn Erso, a young woman whose father was a scientist who tried to hide from the Empire but later was captured and forced to work on the Death Star. When the movie opens, Jyn and her father (Mads Mikkelsen) are living in isolation on a remote planet.

Troops from the Empire swoop in, kill Jyn's mom and take Dad prisoner. Jyn escapes, and grows into a young woman who's recruited by rebels.

Cinematographer Grieg Fraser (Zero Dark Thirty, Foxcatcher) seems to prefer dark imagery that often obscures the actors, which isn't altogether bad considering that Jones's performance feels a bit muted. She's the latest version of a female protagonist who can handle herself -- and others.

Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) leads the rebel mission which is supposed to locate Jyn's father. Neither Cassian nor Jyn initially wants anything to do with the other; it's not providing anything by way of spoilers to say that their relationship evolves -- although it doesn't ignite much by way of sparks.

The other characters include Chirrut (Donnie Yen), a blind monk who knows how to use The Force. Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen) serves as Chirrut's less well-kempt pal.

Other characters include the morally ambivalent Bodhi (Riz Ahmed), and K-2SO, a long-armed droid voiced by Alan Tudyk with 3-CPO intonations. K-2SO comes closest to giving the movie a big of comic spin. It tells you something about this massive enterprise that the character with the most humor is a droid.

The opening of the movie does a bit of confusing planet hopping, before explaining the role that's being played by an oxygen-snorting character portrayed by Forest Whitaker.

You'll also see brief appearances from Darth Vader, but the evil Empire mostly falls under the leadership of Krennic, who appears in a white cape and is played by the always menacing Ben Mendelsohn.

Alien creatures also appear, but this time, few are played for laughs.

I always get a bit lost in Star Wars jargon, so forgive me if I'm wrong in saying the planet Jedha is where much of the movie's explosive urban warfare takes place. A climactic battle is set on Scarif, a planet with beaches and palm trees that give the movie a war-in-the-Pacific flavor.

By the end, Edwards pretty much turns Rogue One into an action blur (on the ground and in space), an interminable battle in which, among other things, space ships and space stations ram into one another with brute force, but without much by way of the rousing thrills.

References to predecessor movies let us know that we are, indeed, in the Star Wars universe, and Rogue One definitely benefits from the association. I'm not sure how it would fare as separate hunk of sci-fi. Probably not so well.

Edwards evidently wanted a bit of war-movie verisimilitude to characterize this journey into the Star Wars universe. That doesn't mean there's no zap and pow to the battles, but it makes you wonder whether the filmmakers have had a memory lapse. Isn't Star Wars supposed to be a fantasy -- telling but still a fantasy?

Oh well, the Star Wars canon is vast, and more movies are planned. But for all its huffing and puffing, this one only intermittently feels like a full-blown helping of deep-space fun.

One thing you can bet on: Devotees don't much care what critics think and will spend lots of time hashing this one out among themselves. If you've grown past that point in your life, I wouldn't say Rogue One, though hardly a bad movie, offers sufficient reason not to get on with other business.

Putting Jason Bourne back into action

Matt Damon returns as an assassin without memory as director Paul Greengrass extends his action set pieces to preposterous extremes.

If you want to spend a couple of hours watching Matt Damon play a character who's running for his life, Jason Bourne -- the latest in the series about an amnesiac spy -- might be the movie for you.

If you're looking for something more, you'll probably have to look elsewhere. We all know that the world seems to be gripped by chaos, but reproducing that chaos on screen doesn't always result in a satisfying movie experience.

With director Paul Greengrass returning to the helm and Damon jumping back into the Bourne saddle, the movie turns into a dizzying attempt to build a story around a reveal in which Bourne learns more background about himself that has been hidden from him by the CIA.

Bourne, you'll recall, has been programmed to kill by the CIA. Aside from quick flashbacks from his past, Bourne has no memory of his pre-espionage life. He often finds himself being chased by the very agency that turned him into a lethal weapon.

When Bourne resurfaces in Greece, a CIA chief (Tommy Lee Jones) tries to "put him down," i.e., Jones' Bob Dewey wants to assassinate Bourne with the help of a ruthless killing machine called "the asset" (Vincent Cassel.)

Dewey receives additional assistance from Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), an ambitious CIA tech genius who seems to be able to locate Bourne whether he's in Greece, Iceland, London, and ... well ... I think stopped caring after Berlin.

The action set pieces tend to be so interminable, I wondered whether Greengrass was trying to set records. And, of course, Greengrass' approach expectedly races over-the-top.

That means logic doesn't always prevail. If Bourne makes a five-story flop onto concrete, don't fret. He'll be on his feet before you can say, "Splat." Like a politician who won't take "no" for an answer, he keeps on running.

The movie opens with Bourne earning his keep as a bare-knuckle fighter in Greece. It doesn't take long for him to wind up on the CIA's radar.

As the story develops, we also meet a tech whiz (Riz Ahmed), a hotshot whose company has been compromised by the CIA. Ahmed's character allows the movie to raise issues about privacy in a time of pervasive on-line activity, but we don't sense that we're supposed to take any of this seriously.

Much of the action takes place in front of CIA surveillance cameras, giving the movie a kind of fractured vision. CGI-enhanced car carnage comes into play, particularly in a ridiculous Las Vegas-based chase involving Bourne and a formidable SWAT vehicle.

In a movie that moves this quickly, acting tends to be more suggestive than deep. A bulked up but deadly serious Damon makes the movie feel like an aerobics workout. Looking as serpentine as ever, Jones tosses off a few off-kilter line readings, and Vikander opts for lots of furrowed-brow concern.

Julia Stiles makes an early picture appearance as Nicky Parsons, a former CIA agent with an agenda of her own.

Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, United 93 and a couple of previous Bourne movies) disorienting approach to action has its fans, and I've been one of them. He can edit a sequence into smithereens and still have it make some sort of sense, but -- in truth -- I got sick of it in this outing.

No matter how much urgency the actors try to bring to their work, the movie's kinetic charge takes precedence as the story works its way toward an expected and slightly depressing possibility: another sequel.

It would have been nice, though, if the filmmakers had been able to make this Bourne revival better than the movies that spawned it.

'Nightcrawler' holds us in its sway

He has a camera, but does he have a soul?

We know little about the background of Lou Bloom, the main character in director Dan Gilroy's disquieting new thriller, Nightcrawler.

An apparent loner, Lou lives in a modest Los Angeles apartment, where he spends lots of time on the Internet. His eyes have the unblinking stare of a surveillance camera in a convenience store. He's definitely weird.

Lou -- a gaunt-looking Jake Gyllenhaal in his best screen performance yet -- appears to have acquired his social skills and stilted speech patterns from a manual, something like "How to Talk to a Prospective Employer."

After a misguided attempt at landing a job, Lou happens upon an automobile accident where a freelance news crew is scurrying to obtain graphic footage.

It's love at first sight for Lou, who understands that he has found a calling that may allow him to abandon minor larceny and enter a world where his lack of inhibition will bring him great success.

In a twisted version of bromides such as "follow your bliss," Lou finds something he truly loves, filming other people's misery.

To launch his career, Lou obtains a cheap camera and a police scanner. He begins to ply his new trade -- at first to the derision of established freelancers such as Joe Loder (Bill Paxton). Loder mocks Lou's amateur equipment and general lack of savvy.

But Lou persists, bringing his first footage to Nina Romina (Rene Russo), a news director at a third-tier local station. Nina knows Lou isn't skilled, but she recognizes that he has the stomach to pursue the "money shot," the gory detail others might avoid.

No spring chicken, Nina's been around the TV block. She's entirely committed to the cliche often used to characterize TV news: "If it bleeds, it leads."

When Nina tells Lou how to approach his newfound craft, she offers this bit of gruesome advice: He should try for images that create the feeling of a screaming woman running down a street with her throat cut.

Fortunately, Nightcrawler isn't another lathered-up critique of the media, although it certainly takes its shots at TV's appetite for sensation-driven content.

No, Nightcrawler is more than an anti-media screed: It's a character study of a man who distorts what might normally be regarded as virtues until they disappear into a haze of amorality. Lou has a preternatural ability to focus and a ravenous hunger for absorbing information that he quickly puts to use.

Joining with cinematographer Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood), Gilroy works from a dark and gleaming palette that avoids most of the usual LA visual cliches. Almost every shot is alive with the city's worst impulses.

Lou's nocturnal adventures -- some quite grisly -- unfold in near-hypnotic fashion: A shooting that leaves gaping holes in a victim, gruesome car wrecks and crime. Lots of crime. Lou specializes in the kind of brutal material customarily presented by news anchors with a caveat: "viewer discretion advised."

Along the way, Lou acquires an assistant (Riz Ahmed), whom he refers to as an employee.

In a bizarre comic scene, Lou promotes Ahmed's Rick from a $30-per-night intern to executive vice-president of what he regards as his burgeoning video news empire. Lou never acts as if he's running anything less than a big-time operation. Lou, of course, believes everything he says. He smiles, but never jokes.

Much of the movie's tension derives from wondering whether Lou is insanely ambitious or simply insane. At one point, he takes Nina to dinner. He's confident enough about his importance to her that he blackmails her into a sexual relationship. The nerd has become a predator.

When you play Nightcrawler back in your head, you may decide that it's guilty of wild exaggeration and that some of Lou's adventures defy plausibility. But when a movie holds you in its sway, as this one does, there's little point complaining.

Honore de Balzac told us that behind every great fortune, there's a great crime. Nightcrawler tells us that crimes great and small are often committed by those who, like Lou, believe in the absolute necessity of their actions.

Lou's a sociopathic creep, all right, but (heaven help us), he's a happy creep. A creep with a destiny.

Complicated thriller misses mark

Tangled plot short-circuits Closed Circuit.

When it's clear from the outset that a movie's going bad, one tends to make quick adjustments, accepting failure and allowing any lingering expectations to slip quietly toward the nearest exit. It might be worse when a movie flirts with success for a while, but never really consummates the relationship.

The British thriller Closed Circuit falls into the second category. The movie begins well enough, creating an aura of grave seriousness and raising an important topical question: How far should governments go in limiting transparency when facing real security threats?

As director John Crowley's thriller progresses, it becomes clear that Steven Knight's screenplay is weaving such a complicated web that it will be forced to hack its way through an overabundance of detail -- often at the expense of character development that could have nourished greater involvement.

The action focuses on two attorneys (Eric Bana and Rebecca Hall) who are assigned to defend a Turkish immigrant (Denis Moschitto) who has been accused of an act of terrorism, setting off a bomb in a crowded London marketplace.

As advocates handling different parts of the case, Bana's Martin Rose and Hall's Claudia Simmons-Howe decide not to disclose to the court that they had an affair that soured, leaving rose with a ruined marriage.

Although both lawyers represent the same defendant, they have different tasks. Rose has been assigned the criminal part of the case; Claudia's job involves overcoming official resistance to sharing evidence that the government contends could compromise national security.

Both attorneys are on on the same side, but they're not supposed to talk to each other.

There's no point faulting the actors, who receive supporting help from Jim Broadbent, as an attorney general who encourages Rose to get with a program that's more interested in protecting the state than in giving the defendant a fair shake.

Also look for good work from Riz Ahmed as a government spy who's supposed to be helpful to Simmons-Howe, but who may have less honorable motives.

Crowley (Intermission and Boy A) works with cinematographer Andriano Goldman to give the movie a dark, edgy feel. But no amount of craft can justify the screenplay's cynicism, which seems to have been applied in ladle-sized helpings that drown out any honestly arrived at conviction.

The radicalizing of a Pakistani

It's probably impossible to discuss The Reluctant Fundamentalist -- director Mira Nair's big-screen adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's 2007 novel -- without at least mentioning the recent bombings at the Boston Marathon. I mention this because Nair's movie poses a topical and eerily relevant question: What might make a highly educated and apparently assimilated Pakistani immigrant wind up opposing everything about the U.S.?

Nair tells the story through a framing device. Changez (Riz Ahmed), a Pakistani professor, meets with a self-described American journalist (Liev Schreiber) in a Lahore cafe. Schreiber's character believes Changez may be able to help locate a kidnapped American.

We soon discover that the story is less interested in the captured American than in allowing Changez to explain how he made the journey from a hot-shot investment banker with a premier Wall Street firm to a radicalized college professor in Pakistan. Changez, we learn, not only lived in the U.S., but availed himself of its greatest opportunities. He graduated from Princeton, and quickly landed on the fast-track to wealth.

Changez tells Schreiber's Bobby the story of events that transformed him from a ruthless takeover artist to an academic who sees a link between the brutalities of capitalism and the world of religious fundamentalism.

If such a connection makes sense, The Reluctant Fundamentalist doesn't succeed in convincing us: The screenplay seems to find some sort of moral equivalence between capitalist ravishments and terrorist slaughter. The idea seems more like a fatuous reach than a devastating insight.

Having said that, it also should be noted that Ahmed gives a terrific performance as a young man learning the American ropes, which at first pull him upward and then threaten to strangle him. Ahmed's avid, intelligent performance holds the movie together, even as the story takes some less-than-credible turns.

The most notable of these unfortunate detours involves the relationship Changez establishes with a photographer named Erica, a mousey looking Kate Hudson. Erica eventually mounts an exhibit of photographs that she believes to be personal and revealing, but which mostly put her post 9/11 bigotry on display.

September 11 and the subsequent change of American attitudes give rise to prejudices that can't help but impact Changez. He's strip-searched at an airport. He's wrongly questioned by the New York City police. He begins to understand that no matter how assimilated he believes himself to be, he can't overcome the bigoted assumptions of those who identify him with terrorism.

Ahmed's fine performance is supplemented by equally strong work from Kiefer Sutherland, as Changez's boss and mentor at the investment banking firm. And it's always nice to see the fine Indian actor Om Puri, even when he's underutilized. He plays Changez's father.

Nair (Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake) keeps the story flowing. She's good at mixing milieu and character and giving material the involving sweep of a novel.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist offers some -- if not all -- of the richness of a novelistic story. But in the end, political reductionism undermines the story's human richness, and Nair manages to give us only flashes of the major work The Reluctant Fundamentalist might have been.