While the “stranger in a strange land” angle has been covered countless times, there’s always something endearing about a character leaving their home to follow their dreams in a foreign land, be it a drama or a comedy. He’ll do anything to avoid disappointing his mother back home and all the villagers who are sure of his success (and helped pay for airfare to America), but most of all his childhood friend, Ruby ( Karen David “Once Upon a Time”), whom he hopes to one day marry. Sami he learns is also home to about a dozen other fellow South Asian immigrants who are making ends meet in menial jobs, despite being professionally trained in specific fields just like himself.Īs the window starts to close on his 30-day visa, Sami is determined to make his way up the corporate ladder and be a “professional American” he’ll have to do so along with his co-workers. One day in the park, Sami is met by Babu ( Rizwan Manji “Outsourced”), a Pakistani peer who offers him a place to stay in a nearby Chicago one-bedroom apartment. He befriends Alex ( Jon Heder “Napoleon Dynamite”), an easy-going fellow draftsman and son of the CEO ( Kevin Pollack) who shows Sami around, getting the new hire accustomed to the politics of the workplace. Unfortunately, downsizing finds him taking a job as a draftsman in the company’s cramped basement where he is to prepare technical drawings for the engineers above him. His dream is to make a lot of money and fly his childhood love to the States, so they can spend the rest of their lives together, making both their families proud. Sami accepts a job in Chicago at a manufacturing firm, hoping to put his engineering education to good use and make a name for himself in America. He retells his story, how he grew up under the care of a loving mother and the support of a community who knew him, under the legacy of his deceased father, who was known as a formidable tiger hunter. The story is set in 1979, when a young engineer named Sami Malik (earnestly played by Danny Pudi “Community”) who decides to follow thru with his dream, leaving his village in India to pursue an engineering career in the United States.
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The refreshingly sweet and wholesome tone of the story feels like the kind of movie that no one makes anymore – free of lewd laughs or cynicism and (gasp) full of heart.
The dramedy is a warmhearted fish-out-of-water period piece from director Lena Khan, making her feature-length debut and it comes across almost like an autobiographical tale, or at least an amalgam of assimilation stories that have been passed down.
It follows the immigrant experience as a whole more than it deals with the pressure of meeting your future spouse, although marriage definitely is on the mind of our protagonist here. If this summer’s “The Big Sick” was your first exposure to certain South Asian customs and traditions, such as prearranged marriage and you find your curiosity piqued, then check out “The Tiger Hunter”. Produced by: Megha Kadakia, Lena Khan and Nadia Khan Immigrant stories certainly don't demand tragedy to be legitimate, but The Tiger Hunter, with its pastiche of fish-out-of-water comedy and pointy collared shirts, ultimately feels weightless.Written by: Lena Khan and Sameer Asad Gardezi
We don't get much in the way of Sami's psychology his father (the tiger hunter), died when he was young, and the flashbacks to Sami's childhood seem to come from a different movie, one that might focus more on hero worship and self-actualization and present a more unique perspective than this rather watered-down portrait of the immigrant experience.
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The men work together to figure out how to engineer a microwave (yet another reminder that it's the 70s), impressing Sami's boss at the company where he works as a lowly draughtsman. At a fountain, where Sami offers a bit of pointed social commentary in his observation that Americans are casually willing to throw money away, he meets another immigrant and moves in with him and his affable roommates - who all share a single bed. The film follows a familiar plot: Sami (Danny Pudi) tries to make it in America and experiences culture shock, but everything works out pretty much okay. The outfits look straight out of a cheap 70s Halloween costume kit, but the colors onscreen are too bright and digital to feel period appropriate, and when a character mentions The Dukes of Hazard it doesn't do much more than elicit a small nod of recognition. The Tiger Hunter, a 1979-set drama about a young aspiring engineer who emigrates to Chicago from India, relies too heavily on cutesy, perfunctory period references. It's a shame, then, when such stories are told in a predictable fashion. Stories of immigrant life are more important than ever.
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