Starring: Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, Live Schreiber, Keifer Sutherland, Om Puri
Release Date: August 1, 2013
The Reluctant Fundamentalist (TRF) is not a movie you would put in your blockbuster bill. Relying more on plot and less on style, TRF centers around the topic of terrorism that you might think would bore your eyes out. Yet, it makes for a riveting watch, leaving you thinking long and hard even after it ends.
Based on a novel of the same name by Moshin Hamid, the movie’s protagonist is a Pakistani man named Changez who got embroiled in a terrorist plot to kidnap a professor. Essentially, the movie tells the story of Changez’s life – from his meteoric rise in an American consulting firm to the racial profiling he underwent post-9/11. This story is being recounted to an American writer, Bobby, in a tea house in Lahore – with constant echoes of gun shots and student protests in the background to remind us of his tribulation.
We learn that Changez had big dreams to change the world, all the while living out his own American dream. We are there when his own father thought he had become an American stereotype and forgotten his roots. We see the hostility that he meets with after 9/11 and the humiliating cavity search he had to undergo at the airport just because of his last name. And of course, we are witness to Changez’s romance with an American girl called Erica, who is beset with her own identity conflicts and demons. At the end of it, we are rooting for Changez – we don’t want him to be involved in terrorism as we wait and hope for his inner goodness to pull through. Even after all the misery Changez is put through, the story may yet be over. Bobby might not be an innocent author merely interested in Changez’s story. He has his own agenda – one that could put Changez in danger, once again because of his last name, religious identity and appearance.
What makes The Reluctant Fundamentalist such a great movie is its difference from the countless terrorism-related movies released in waves, post-9/11. Instead, the director, Mira Nair, tells a human story full of heart, rather than covert sleeper cells and blown up buildings.