The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Overview

Beyond the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the attacks of September 11 set in motion a third, different kind of battle. One fought on the home front; a quiet, uncomfortable and unspoken war of words and sidelong glances directed towards anyone who suddenly came to look 'different', 'foreign', 'un-American'. The inadequacies of American security were undeniable; however, the indignity of the racial profiling that became rampant in their wake remains — to this day — an irredeemable blight on the United States' history.

It's within this framework that author Mohsin Hamid set his bestselling 2007 novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, now a film by director Mira Nair. It tells the story of Changez (Riz Ahmed), a prodigious Pakistani-born Princeton graduate who's headhunted by Jim (Kiefer Sutherland) to work in New York's top consultancy firm. With the company placing him on the fast-track to partnership and the chairman's daughter (Kate Hudson) quickly besotted, Changez's pursuit of the American dream seems assured. But then the Twin Towers come crashing down, and so too his perceived security. Colleagues view him differently, arrests and random searches become commonplace and despicable bigotry bubbles to the surface. At first Changez ignores, then endures, the prejudice, but eventually the feeling of victimisation and the loss of his identity become untenable and he returns to Pakistan.

The film flicks back and forth between Changez's time in America and his present-day life as a 'radical academic' suspected of kidnapping an American colleague, and it's those latter scenes that engage most directly. Played out as an interview with US journalist Bobby (Liev Schreiber), they've a distinctly Cold War-era feel to them in the vein of the recent Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Schreiber puts in a great performance as the journo with his own secrets, and Sutherland shines as a Gordon Gecko-esque corporate cutthroat; however, it's Ahmed who steals the show. At times the rhetoric is handled a touch clumsily and the 'fundamentals of business'/'fundamentals of Islam' motif is, like the book, not especially subtle, but The Reluctant Fundamentalist remains a compelling and confronting examination of one of the war on terror's less publicised dimensions.