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That's what ''The Namesake” is largely about. It focuses on a Bengali couple who move to the United States and raises a family, so it naturally involves cultural and generational clashes. But most of these clashes relate to choices of some sort.

What makes ''The Namesake” work so effectively is the way director Mira Nair (''Vanity Fair,” ''Mississippi Masala”) manages to weave this theme into an understated story that captures the lives of the immigrant parents and their American-born children.

Kal Penn - he was Kumar in ''Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” - plays the couple's son, Gogol Ganguli, who emerges as the central character, though his mother, Ashima (Tabu), and father, Ashoke (Irfan Khan), receive about as much of Nair's attention.

Gogol, named by his father for a Russian author, chooses to go by the Americanized name Nick, symbolic of his choice to assimilate into Amercan culture (playing Pearl Jam, finding a WASP-ish girlfriend) rather than conforming to the Bengali traditions of his parents. Yet, the more he experiences life, the more he's drawn to his parents' culture.

His conflicting emotions have been experienced earlier - and, perhaps, more intensely - by his parents, who, following their arranged marriage in India, leave their families to build a life in America. After all, the United States is the land of opportunity - though settling in also leads to loneliness for Ashima.

Although the Bengali culture provides ''The Namesake” with its own distinct flavor, Nair and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala (''Mississippi Masala”), working from a novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, capture universal challenges and emotions experienced by families of any background. Parents watch their children grow and hope to impart some of their values and traditions to them. Children, as they approach adulthood, yearn to carve out their own lives, and, in the process, they often reject their parents' ways. Yet, family values and traditions are not so easy to shed, and once youths become adults, they might re-evaluate their choices and values; they might return to the fold. At this point, though, it's often on their own terms.

Nair and her uniformly excellent cast convincingly and movingly depict this phenomenon in a film that ranks among the year's best.

Tim Miller is the Times' entertainment editor. He can be reached at 508-862-1140 or tmiller@capecodonline.com

RATING SCALE: Four stars (best) to bomb (worst)
RATING: PG-13 (for sexuality/nudity, a scene of drug use, some disturbing images and brief language
RUNNING TIME: 122 minutes