There's a reductionist quality to Mira Nair's "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" that doesn't wash with me. Riz Ahmed plays Changez Khan, brilliant and brimming with self-confidence, who comes to America from Pakistan, aces college and business school, and lands a high-paying job with a top Wall Street consulting firm. Only after 9/11 does he feel the tug of his homeland, and only because a couple of dehumanizing civil liberties violations force him to grapple with his identity. On one occasion, he's pulled from a TSA airport line and strip-searched; on another, he's mistaken for a thief to whom he bears at best an attenuated physical resemblance and arrested and brought in for questioning ("How do you feel about America?").
