TIFF Review: SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE Posted by Todd Brown at 11:28am. Posted in Film & DVD Reviews , Drama, Asia, UK, Ireland, Australia & New Zealand, Toronto Film Festival 2008. As if Millions left any doubt about Danny Boyles ability to draw compelling performances out of young actors Slumdog Millionaire abolishes those doubts utterly. In many waysSlumdog plays like the older and edgier cosusin of Millionsand, just like that very under rated picture, Slumdog stands as one of Boyle’s absolute best. Jamal is a very lucky man. Maybe. The eighteen year old orphan from Mumbai is about to strike it rich. Jamal is a contestant on the local version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and a very successful one at that: concluding his first appearance on the show just a single question away from winning the twenty million rupee grand prize. But perhaps Jamal is a little bit too successful … after all, how could an orphaned, uneducated teenager who grew up hard in the slums possibly have been able to know the answer to the assortment of questions that had been thrown at him? Doctors and lawyers fail well before the stage he has reached and so there can be only one conclusion: Jamal must be a fraud artist of the highest order and so the police bring him in for questioning overnight to judge if he should be allowed to rejoin the show the next day for his shot at the prize. And when you’re a poor kid in Mumbai there is only one sort of police questioning and it’s a fair bit more physical than anything Jamal experienced on the show. He is beaten, strung up, pumped full of electricity, all in the name of finding out how he cheated. The only problem is that he didn’t. Jamal answered the questions honestly on the show and so he simply cannot give the police the answers the are looking for. Finally, after a grueling night the officer in charge of the investigation decides to change tack and instead ask Jamal how he could possibly have known the answers and this is where things get interesting. Each of the questions triggers a specific memory from Jamal’s childhood and as he makes his way through a tape of his Millionaire appearance we get his history told to us in flashback and it’s a gripping, heart breaking story. We see Jamal and his brother Salim growing up in the incredibly vast slums of Bombay – the name change comes later – begging, borrowing and stealing whatever they need while their mother tries to keep them on the straight and narrow. They are infectious and full of life, defiant in the face of the incredible poverty that they face daily, taunting the police who chase them off of private land and pursuing their favorite movie stars. And then tragedy strikes in the form of religious based riots when Hindu factions storm their slum killing any Muslims they can find. The boys escape but their mother is not so lucky and the are forced to make their way alone. Their path is a long and winding one, one that takes them from living in a garbage dump to an exploitative faux-orphanage only interested in the money they can make from the children, to running scams on trains and at the Taj Mahal and finally back again. And what brings the boys back is, of course, a girl, their one true friend whom Jamal is deeply in love with. Love makes nothing easier, of course, particularly when you are so young and poor and unable to declare yourself and their return leads to violence, bloodshed, betrayal, separation and Salim’s quick descent into a life of crime and gangsterism. Slumdog Millionaire is a film that works on an astonishing number of levels. It is a gripping character study and potent dissection of celebrity. It captures intense social problems and the reality of a hard, hard life for millions of people. It is an adventure, a romance, a childhood memory. It shifts gears and tones early and often and yet it all holds shape as a remarkably cohesive whole, one that will no doubt continue to reveal layers and detail with repeated viewing. The writing and direction, no doubt, have a great deal to do with the film’s success as both are absolutely stellar. But the heart of the film, the element that truly makes it sing are the nine actors at its core. Boyle tells his story in three general time frames with each of the three principal characters – the brother and their friend – represented by a different actor in each time period. And not only are each of the nine actors remarkable in their own right but they are so well cast and so well rehearsed that each feels like an actual, organic extension of what came before. Each of the characters feels totally consistent from start to finish, a truly remarkable feat considering that each of the three characters could have gone horribly wrong with a single wrong decision on any of the nine actors chosen. The eldest version of Salim, in particular, turns in an absolute powerhouse of a performance, a totally riveting piece of work that will hopefully prove to be a star maker for him. A curious sort of epic that starts strong and only gets stronger until it reaches its potent conclusion, Slumdog Millionaire is Boyle at his absolute best.
