Slumdog Millionaire

I suppose you could call this film a "sleeper," but it sure has woken up a lot of people. Reviews have been enthsiastic, and positive word of mouth is helping out. It just may be the "little film that could" at this year's Oscars. But I still predict The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is poised for Oscar domination. Nevertheless, Slumdog Millionaire is the film to see at the moment, so you should seize the moment and see it. It's got style to burn, and it's one of the most creatively edited films I've seen in a long time. Herewith, my review.



SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE


With the accolades pouring in for Slumdog Millionaire, the million-dollar question is, Does it live up to all the hype? The choices are:

A) Yes, completely
B) No, not at all
C) Yes, most of the time
D) No, most of the time

The answer is C, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Consider, to begin with, its unusual heritage: based on a novel by Indian writer Vikas Swarup, and co-directed by British filmmaker Danny Boyle (Trainspotting), Slumdog brandishes a highly polished style drawn from both Western crime films and Bollywood melodrama—a gritty saga of survival in the Mumbai underworld basted with the extravagant passions of Eastern musical romance. The story follows 18-year-old Jamal (Dev Patel) on his journey from homeless orphan to popular contestant on India’s version of the TV game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? After improbably winning 10 million rupees on his first night, the show’s creators suspect him of cheating—how could someone of his humble station know the answers to so many questions?—and have him interrogated by the police, who brutally try to beat the truth out of him. But Jamal sticks to his story—he won the money fairly because he knew the answers.

The mystery of his surprising performance ingeniously provides the film’s structure, which unfolds in overlapping flashbacks that both recount Jamal’s harrowing childhood and illustrate how he came by the information for each correct answer. Orphaned when their mother is killed during an attack on a Muslim settlement, Jamal and his older brother Salim begin a horrifying descent into the life of the streets that so many children--the “slumdogs” of the title--are condemned to in their impoverished country. Almost immediately, they pick up a third companion, an orphaned girl named Latika, who in near operatic fashion brings Jamal face to face with his destiny. Narrowly escaping tragedy at the hands of a sinister desperado named Maman, who collects abandoned children and organizes them into an army of beggars (a vicious reworking of Oliver Twist’s Fagin), the brothers leave Mumbai and ride the rails across the picturesque Indian countryside, surviving by stealing food and other necessities. But they are forced to leave Latika behind, and as the years pass and they graduate to small-time hustling (including a highly amusing sequence in which they scam European tourists visiting the Taj Mahal), Jamal never abandons the hope that one day he will return to Mumbai to find his lost love, even though the more hardened, and criminally inclined, Salim urges him to forget her.

The plot, despite its Eastern setting, has its roots firmly planted in Western culture, in particular Greek mythology’s tale of Orpheus and Eurydice (a magical scene has young Jamal entranced by a nighttime staging of Gluck’s opera in front of the Taj Mahal). Banished to the hell of sexual slavery, Latika (Freida Pinto, in the adult role) longs for Jamal to rescue her, and Jamal lets neither the separation of distance nor the threat of death stop his search. But these lofty sentiments are brought back to earth by Slumdog’s borrowing of story elements from a 1930’s Warner Brothers gangster flick, i.e. two brothers grow up in the slums, one goes straight, the other becomes a criminal, and both love the same girl. This kind of cross-breeding between genres gives Slumdog its considerable energy and, ironically, its sense of something new: a deathless tale told in popular jargon against a raw, unfamiliar background.

Boyle uses this background to tremendous effect. His exuberant embrace of the pictorial qualities of society’s lower depths equals his signature work in Trainspotting (1996), a fevered examination of life among young Edinburgh heroin addicts. As in that film, Boyle--here, with co-director Loveleen Tandan--displays a keen eye for the grotesque shapes of poverty, vividly capturing the sights, sounds--and one can almost imagine, the smells--of a putrescent environment. It is somewhat worrisome, at times, that it is all photographed so lovingly, so picturesquely, that much of the misery is drained from the miserable conditions of existence on display. Poverty this “exotic” appears colorful, and the film’s kinetic direction injects movie excitement into the kids’ struggle for survival, as if life on the streets is an endless game of hooky. Enfold all this in a celebration of all-conquering love, and the viewer approaches the psychological detachment of fantasy, which the film cleverly acknowledges in the closing Bollywood-style dance number that precedes the end credits.

If it weren’t for the drama that unfolds on and around the set of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Slumdog might have trouble reconciling its various personalities. The satirical but insightful depiction of the game show, with its fanatically devoted audience and its condescending, manipulative host, both exposes the exploitative nature of television and celebrates the power of mass media to unite a country made volatile by tensions between social classes and factions. In like manner, the disparate influences behind this fascinating film coalesce around the TV show’s ritual of question and answer (it’s based on a novel entitled Q & A). The end result is a portrait of Jamal that has been assembled like a puzzle--not a terribly complex puzzle, but certainly a captivating one. First-time actor Dev Patel’s skillful performance perfectly captures Jamal’s innocence and determination, his growing confidence from question to question and his increasing willingness to risk everything for a greater goal, a development that mirrors the maturation, from one flashback to the next, of this street urchin into a national hero.

As the film comes full circle, so we arrive back at the opening question, which is also the final one. Does Slumdog Millionaire live up to all the hype? C) Yes, most of the time. And that’s my final answer.