In the present day, Indian-American Smith reflects on his adolescent experiences as a young immigrant (Roni Akurati) after his family moved to America in 1979. There, his parents' (Poorna Jagannathan and Shoba Narayan) traditional Indian values conflicted with his growing affection for American trends of the time like KFC (even though his family are all vegetarians), Star Wars, and especially disco and Saturday Night Fever. The girl who catches his eye and heart is Amy (Brighton Sharbino) and even while the times change, she never quite leaves his thoughts. To complete Smith's education in all things American, Amy's outdoorsman father Butch (Jason Lee) introduces him to hunting.
Growing Up Smith begins charmingly with its loving homages to aforementioned '70s pop culture hallmarks and its effort to establish a fish-out-of-water coming-of-age narrative. But then it insists on changing course into such familiar and wholesome territory that it becomes bogged down in tired cliches. It really did feel to me exactly like a feature-length episode of The Wonder Years (a show I adore, by the way) except with an immigrant family. It has the voice-over narration from adult Smith and everything! Working from the screenplay by Anjul Nigam, Paul Quinn and Gregory Scott Houghton, Australian director Frank Lotito's approach here just shows no zest or empathy for me. Aesthetically it also lacks any fitting cultural touches like mystical visuals or sitar music; I realise those are both stereotypically Indian themselves but I think they could've been employed to literally clash with the Western ones that were included, to emphasise Smith's of-two-worlds situation more pointedly. Instead, the approach here taken struck me as uninspired and hackneyed, with bland jokes to boot. Oh, and the soundtrack consists of covers of Bee Gees hits. That was probably because the small budget limited which versions they could afford the rights to, but I suspect the band would be happy the originals couldn't be used.
Overall, this was a harmless and lightweight but fatally cliched and unfunny return to very familiar territory. 5/10.
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