What I know is that I've been had. I thought this was a movie about Gogol Ganguli (Kal Penn) returning to India to discover his roots.

That's certainly how all the advertisements made it look. That's because if they explained what it's really about - a long, boring film about an Indian family and how it emigrates from India and morphs into an Indian-American family - nobody would go see it.

Despite what the trailers might suggest, this is a relatively straight, linear story. Ashoke Ganguli (Irfan Khan) marries Ashima (Tabu) in an arranged marriage, comes to the U.S., has a couple of kids who grow up American, and must evolve as an Indian-American. The film is about Ashoke, Ashima and Gogol in equal parts. The Ganguli's daughter, Sonia (Sahira Nair), is pretty much forgotten except for some short sequences.

There's all this crap about Gogol's name and what it means and why it's significant and, of course, it's all this big metaphor for Gogol accepting who he is. At first, he hooks up with a typical American girl named Maxine (Jacinda Barrett), but then tragedy forces him to explore his heritage, which he does by marrying Moushumi (Zuleikha Robinson), which is one of those semi-typical movie hook-ups you just know is going to end badly.

I suppose one could call this the great Indian-American movie, but that's just because it's the only one.