The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Mira Nair's adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's novel is one of the most politically charged films of the post-9/11 era. Riz Ahmed plays Changez, a brilliant Pakistani analyst at a Wall Street firm whose life is upended by the attacks of September 11, 2001. The moment he is strip-searched at an American airport — despite his Princeton degree, his corporate job, his American girlfriend — something breaks.

The film is structured as an extended conversation between Changez and an American journalist (Liev Schreiber) in a Lahore café, with the implicit threat that the journalist may be CIA and Changez may be a terrorist. The ambiguity is the point: after 9/11, every brown body became a suspect, every Pakistani a potential fundamentalist.

Ahmed's performance is remarkable — he makes Changez sympathetic without excusing his eventual radicalization. The film doesn't endorse fundamentalism, but it explains why a brilliant, secular, Western-educated man might be seduced by it: not because of theology, but because a country that told him he belonged has decided he does not.