‘A Nice Indian Boy’ Trades Tropes for Truth
How refreshing it is when a small film with a big heart comes along unannounced and captures your affection. A surprise hit across America as well as a popular streaming link, A Nice Indian Boy is a charming, feel-good movie about Naveen, a gay Indian doctor whose conventional family wants him to make their lives complete by meeting the perfect girl and getting married. They already have a grown daughter who is unhappily married and getting a divorce. Their hopes for completing a perfect family unit depend on the devoted but desperately lonely Naveen.
Unfortunately for them all, his perfect mate turns out to be another boy—a very attractive, appealing photographer named Jay, played by the award-winning Broadway musical comedy star Jonathan Groff, who won last year’s Tony award for the revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along and is currently packing them as legendary Bobby Darin in the new show Just in Time. At first, it seems like an illogical romantic duo, until the realism in Eric Randall’s ardent screenplay, winningly directed by Roshan Sethi, explains that Jay was an orphan adopted by Indian parents and has a soft spot in his heart for his Indian upbringing.
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A NICE INDIAN BOY ★★★★ (4/4 stars) |
Jay is ready after a second date to take the relationship a step further—toward commitment and marriage and being accepted again as part of a real family from India. What follows is a long, tortured journey toward compromise, tolerance and acceptance, full of speed bumps and potholes. Both actors are so natural, endearing and relentlessly honest that they meld like coffee and cream. There’s poignancy in the love they share when they are together, and in the pain they feel when they’re apart, and I seriously doubt there’s a soul in the audience who won’t root for them to make it. There’s also a lot of tenderness and humor in the courtship and the eventual wedding you won’t forget.
There’s wit as well in Naveen’s family members, who try to hold onto the traditions they respect, the children who didn’t pan out the way they hoped and planned, and the needs of everyone old and young alike to adjust to life between old values and modern emotional demands. It’s a film of both subtlety and seriousness, completely different from anything I’ve seen lately and laudably without a shred of sentimentality. Somewhere in the middle comes the reality of how the more different we all are, the more we all have in common.