The Reluctant Fundamentalist
A confronting and compelling look at post 9/11 racism in America.
Overview
Alongside the front line conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the attacks of September 11 set in motion a third, different kind of battle. 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' or 'un-American' ensued. While the inadequacies of American security were undeniable, the indignity of the racial profiling that became rampant in their wake remains to this day an irredeemable blight on the history of the United States.
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. When the Twin Towers come crashing down, so too does 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 hold a distinctly Cold War-era feel that's in the vein of the recent Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
While Schreiber puts in a sound performance as the journo with his own secrets and Sutherland shines as a Gordon Gecko-esque corporate cutthroat, 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, as is the case in 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.
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