Film Review: We Think You’ll Feel Good Watching “Growing Up Smith”

A young Indian boy comes of age in small-town America in this charming immigrant’s tale, in theatres now.

Currently in the midst of a limited theatrical run, Growing Up Smith is the infectious, nostalgia-soaked tale of a 10-year-old Indian immigrant named Smith Bhatnagar (newcomer Roni Akurati) and his life in small-town Connecticut circa 1979. Introduced racing up and down the streets of his small town on his beloved bike, hailing everyone he encounters with the traditional American greeting of “How do?”, young Smith spends the film’s breezy 90-minute runtime falling in love with the girl next door (The Walking Dead’s Brighton Sharbino) and going on adventures with her cowboyish tow-truck driver dad (Jason Lee), all the while trying to skirt the watchful eye of his traditionalist father Bhaaskar (Anjul Nigam), who enthusiastically brought his young family to the States to pursue the American Dream (going so far as to name his son “Smith”), but insists they adhere strictly to the traditions and customs of their homeland.

Beyond playing dad, Nigam is also the film’s producer and co-writer. He has a long and diverse resume in Hollywood, having appeared in prominent guest-starring roles on such TV shows as Grey’s Anatomy, True Detective, Revenge and Jimmy Kimmel Live! Growing Up Smith marks his big-screen producing debut, But though it’s being released in 2017, Nigam’s been working on this for over a decade.

“Getting the money for the film took a lot longer than I had ever anticipated,” he chuckles. “One fraudulent investor after another or a real investor who claimed that they were ready to do this and never actually came through. Saying you’ll finance a movie is one thing…”

Still, he stuck with it, and held out until he got the budget he felt he needed to tell the story he wanted to tell. Because that’s what you do when you’re making your passion project.

“It’s a story taken right out of my own experience growing up in Connecticut,” Nigam explains. “For example, the trick-or-treating scene where [Bhaaskar is] handing out the coins; that’s my father. He still lives in the same house he’s lived in since 1973; and if you went trick-or-treating there on a Halloween night, you’ll get coins. He’s old, but he’s still handing out coins in Connecticut . . . for [Bhaaskar], the character as we wrote it, the role model for the character is my own father.”

Interestingly enough, as personal as this story was, the screenplay originated from someone else, an amateur writer by the name of Gregory Scott Houghton, who sought out Nigam with a screenplay he’d written based on stories he’d heard from his old roommate, an Indian immigrant. “The essence of the story was there,” Nigam recalls, “but it needed to be written from the perspective of a natural Indian immigrant.”

And so he went about infusing the saga of Roni with his own experiences growing up in Connecticut, adding the bit about the Halloween coins, an arcane, squatting-based Indian punishment that Smith and his sister must endure for misbehaving, and most critically, tapping into the push and pull between assimilating and maintaining your heritage that all immigrants experience.

“[My family] came to the States in 1967; and it was myself, my two older brothers and my parents. When we made our home in America in the suburbs, we were like a little capsule inside our household that was frozen in time in 1967 India,” Nigam recalls. “So while the world was becoming Westernized, many immigrants would be frozen in time in the period when the left their homeland. And what was really bizarre for me growing up was we’d go back home to visit family and I’d see my cousins who were about my age, and they were a lot more Westernized than I was.”

Ultimately, he was able to attract an old actor friend he’d met in Australia, Frank Lotito, to sit in the director’s chair, and a cast of talented performers, including rising star Poorna Jagannathan (recently seen in HBO’s The Night Of), who plays Bhaaskar’s put-upon wife Nalini.

“It’s my favorite kind of set — where there is so much invested and it’s so personal,” she says. “The energy is different: the drive, the passion, the willingness to improv and let go of things you thought were dear to you.”

Jagannathan’s real moment to shine on-screen comes toward the end, when Bhaaskar and Nalini, fresh off realizing both their children have strayed from the Indian values they’d hoped to instil them with, grapple with the decision to send one or both of them back to India.

“Our poor immigrant parents! The moment a parent finds out they have lost control over their child is a moment of reckoning. Especially Indian parents! But that mindset of sending a child back to India, or having a grandparent in India raise one of your kids till you’re ready for them in the US, isn’t all that uncommon. Especially back then in the 60’s and 70’s. In my own family, many cousins were raised by my grandparents in India and brought to the States when my aunts and uncles were ready to provide for them. That said, it’s a heartbreaking moment – when Smith’s parents [grapple with sending] him back because they think it’ll be better for him to be raised there. It was a hard moment to play but I understood where it was coming from.”

Much as it’s an authentic recreation of the immigrant experience, for its star/writer/producer, this is also a universal story, instantly relatable to anyone who’s felt outside their comfort zone.

“The themes of this movie are about first love, childhood heroes and growing up in a small town, in many ways being a fish out of water,” Nigam notes. “But fish out of water doesn’t necessarily mean an immigrant; it can be a fish out of water in any capacity. It can be a person who’s handicapped in a community of athletes. The new kid coming into the city from a small town; he’s a fish out of water. We’ve all been a fish out of water at some point in our lives.”

Now, as the film prepares to reach its widest audience yet this Friday following a 25-festival run that began two years ago, Nigam acknowledges it’s a little “bittersweet” to see this journey come to an end. But the memories will stick with him—particularly one very special screening.

“[The first showing, at the Seattle International Film Festival] was hugely, hugely gratifying,” Nigam explains. “Even more gratifying than that was Woodstock, and I’ll tell you why: we shot in that area, upstate New York, and much of the cast and crew came, and a lot of my friends from Connecticut, my high-school friends . . . And my father came.”

Main Image Photo Credit: Growing Up Smith