<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" When Mira Nair was getting ready to make her new film, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the award-winning director got some unexpected push back. First, a screenwriter she was considering told her she had to change the title because, he said, &amp;quot;You couldn&amp;#039;t drag me to see a film with the word fundamentalist in it.&amp;quot; Then a British financier who was one of her backers pressured Nair&amp;#039;s longtime producing partner, Lydia Dean Pilcher, to cut the budget\u2014hard to do when you&amp;#039;re filming on two continents. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t care if you shoot in Rockaway Beach, darling,&amp;quot; he told Pilcher. &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s face it, your leading man is a Pakistani Muslim.&amp;quot; Never mind that Liev Schreiber and Kiefer Sutherland get plenty of screen time, as does a womanly, dark-haired Kate Hudson, playing a young widow the so-called Muslim longs for. I count three different insults in these comments, not least among them an infuriating arrogance toward women. But Nair isn&amp;#039;t fazed. She knows what she&amp;#039;s got. Her leading man is a thoroughly assimilated Pakistani called Changez, as comfortable in New York City as Nair is. Played by the excellent young actor and rapper Riz Ahmed, Changez is a brainy Princeton grad in thrall to his ability to make obscene amounts of money on Wall Street. And then 9/11 happens and turns everything upside down. For one small, wretched example, he&amp;#039;s taken aside at the airport and stripped to the waist before he can fly to see his family in Lahore. The Reluctant Fundamentalist has the pulse of a thriller, although it isn&amp;#039;t about terrorism or religion run amok but rather a deadly and recurrent clash of cultures with no end in sight. &amp;quot;Since 9/11 there has been such a schism between the [South Asian] Continent and the U.S.,&amp;quot; Nair says sadly. &amp;quot;This gave me the chance to make a movie with a real dialogue between them. I wanted truth in this movie, not an ax to grind. I know both because I love them both.&amp;quot; She&amp;#039;s not kidding; Nair is a true cosmopolite. &amp;quot;I live half the year in New York City,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;My husband is a professor at Columbia, and I teach in the film department as an adjunct.&amp;quot; When she called for our interview, I expected her to be at her other home, in Uganda, where she runs a hands-on film school, but she was in New Delhi because she was about to be cele-brated in her hometown. What could be sweeter? Nair comes back over and over again to family, and she never puts a foot wrong, whether regarding the secret lurking in the wonderfully vibrant Monsoon Wedding or the almost sacrificial tenderness of the parents in The Namesake. Families\u2014what they do to and for you, and what they don&amp;#039;t\u2014are \u2028her specialty. The Reluctant Fundamentalist isn&amp;#039;t a political movie; it&amp;#039;s an intimate, human one about people caught up in politics, religion, intolerance, or, if they&amp;#039;re lucky, what Buddhism calls loving kindness. We visit these characters&amp;#039; families time and again, and we&amp;#039;re the richer for it. &amp;quot;I want to remind people that the essence of us is the beating heart,&amp;quot; Nair says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s who we all are in the world.&amp;quot; The celebration in India was for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Nair&amp;#039;s first feature film, the 1988 hit Salaam Bombay!, a harrowing drama about a young boy surviving by his wits on Bombay&amp;#039;s streets. There are thousands of homeless children in urban India. Not only did Nair teach as many as she could\u2014including her lead\u2014to act in the movie, she used the money it made to set up a trust for the city&amp;#039;s urchins. &amp;quot;The most important celebration is for the trust,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s thriving. We reach 5,000 kids with 17 centers, 168 social workers, and five shelters.&amp;quot; They get fed, are taught literacy, find work, and man the hotline to help each other. Nair may not be a cosmopolite so much as one of those Hindu goddesses who are depicted with all the extra arms. Liked this story? Get it first when you subscribe to ELLE magazine. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/reviews/a13854/the-reluctant-fundamentalist-movie-review/?src=global_footer>