V.S. Naipaul’s first novel, about a Trinidadian writer of modest gifts who has a career as a village healer thrust upon him and then attains island-wide political prominence, only to end up alienated from his people, is a cleverly constructed work of marvelous humor and linguistic richness. For this film adaptation, director Ismail Merchant contents himself with meager approximations of those qualities. Merchant probably hopes that, however leaden his handling of Naipaul’s narrative and however pusillanimous his treatment of Naipaul’s ironies, the re-creation of Trinidad in the ’40s and ’50s (the period of the story) is a task rarely enough performed and of sufficient inherent interest to make a film of the book worthwhile. But though the movie catches the flavor of the novel’s dialogue and splashes local color around with the requisite tasteful jollification, Merchant fails to make the characters vivid or understandable (despite a cast that includes Aasif Mandvi, Ayesha Dharker, Om Puri, and James Fox), and he obscures the political and social conflicts that give the story its point.