White Teeth

It’s not hard for me to hold a book near and dear to my heart, and White Teeth was one of those crazy, strange trips across generations and locations that wrapped me up in its warmth, humor and sense of generational/cultural tension. I was curious but cautious if this four episode mini-series could do any kind of justice to the book.

Luckily, White Teeth has survived the transition from page to (small) screen. A film of the novel would’ve required too much material being removed for the sake of fitting the sprawling tale into a two hour running time. This mini-series, while not perfect but my god is it fantastic, does justice to the novels epic look at two central families and changing times in which they interact.

Each of the four episodes, much like the book, focuses in on one of the four major male characters. The first section, “The Peculiar Second Marriage of Archie Jones,” details the events leading up to Archie and Clara meeting, getting married, having their daughter Irie and reconnecting with Archie’s old friend, Samad, and his arranged marriage and eventually his wife’s pregnancy with their twin sons. We cover as much ground in the proceeding episodes as they detail the immigrant experience, the gap between immigrants and their children as they assimilate into a new culture, racial and religious identity.

It’s grand in its ambitions and handles many of these subjects with a great deal of humor. Simultaneously it’s unafraid to treat certain aspects with stone-faced seriousness as Millat struggles with finding an identity outside of a troublemaker and suddenly becomes wrapped up in a fringe extremist group. Or the blackly humorous pseudo-adoption of Millat and his twin brother Magid by the upper class Jewish intellectual family, the Malfens, can take some surprisingly dark turns. The mother in particular ignores her own son in favor of the exotic and dangerous Millat, who becomes less of an actual person and more of passion project to show that Western mothering and pandering can turn any problem child around.

While the series is incredibly well-acted and expertly cast from top to bottom, although I’m not so sure that someone as cute as James McAvoy is who I had in mind for the nerdy Josh, White Teeth does tend to unfairly marginalize the female characters who were so well-rounded in the novel. Naomie Harris as Clara and Archie Panjabi as Alsana turn in fiercely committed performances that announce their talents as actresses with a loud bang, but they’re given relatively little to do outside of the first two episodes, Harris more so as her daughter Irie seems to occupy most of the time allotted for a female character. Irie’s prominence makes sense since she’s the same age of the two boys, but Clara’s relationship with both her religious zealot mother and Irie took some unexpected and surprisingly emotional turns in the novel that are sorely missed here. While Panjabi still gets a few great scenes in the later episodes, one that springs to mind is when she confronts Joyce Malfen about Millat’s disappearance and eventual membership in the extremist group. I just wanted so much more from the two of them because they turn in such finely modulated and emotional convincing work here.

This means the burden of carrying the series falls on the three central male actors, one of whom must put double duty through special effects work. Thankfully, each of them attack their roles head-on and create distinct and believable characters. Phil Davis as Archie is like someone took the mental picture from my mind as I was reading the novel and gave it three dimensional life. Om Puri as Samad has the grander and bigger role, and he performs it as if he knows his life depends on it. It’s a marriage of role and actor that can create a masterful and wondrous dynamic and brings a real energy to the screen each time he’s allowed to show us the various twists and turns his character’s journey takes him on. And Christopher Simpson truly captures the conflicted Millat and more English-than-English Magid, carving out a separate yet whole persona for each of the boys.

While White Teeth may have a problem distributing equal amounts of time between its principal characters, it makes up for this with a propulsive energy that just never stops. Somehow the entire thing remains fairly intimate when we pause for a quiet moment to allow for the characters to express their innermost thoughts and desires, but the energy never waivers.

As a beacon for the “post-racial society” that the western world is allegedly moves towards at a slow scale, White Teeth couldn’t be a better document of that process. As the offspring of several different cultures and racial identities coming together myself, I understand and empathized with the plights of characters like Irie and Magid, and found myself totally immersed in their drama. I just wish that they had found more time to pay off some of the subplots involving WWII, Mangal Pande and Irie’s relationship with her grandmother. Those subplots revealed much about the assumptions, secrets and personalities of the characters and emerged into some surprising twists. Ah well, we can’t have it all. I’m just so happy it turned out to be as close to perfect an adaptation as it did.