Bollywood meets Hollywood in Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire
By Scott Foundas
Tuesday, November 11th 2008 at 12:39pm
* Ishika Mohan
Like Dickens with rupees
Details:
Slumdog Millionaire
Directed by Danny Boyle
Fox Searchlight
Opens November 12
* The N-Word Is Flourishing Among Generation Hip-Hop Latinos (26)
Why should we care now?
* The Book of Sarah (Palin) (22)
Strafing the Palin record
* Watching the V.P. Debate with Young, Black, Palin-Proud Republicans
(9)
Watching the chronic winker with her outnumbered, seemingly unlikely supporters
* A Hip Young Couple Clears Out Low-Rent Tenants for its Television and
Playroom Needs (8)
Generation excess comes to Prospect Heights
* Angelina Jolie Suffers For Us All in Changeling; Zinedine Zidane
Watches a Good Game in A 21st Century Portrait (8)
I think icon
* Oliver Stone Assigns Motive to Dubya's M.O. In W.
But at this point, who cares? (Other than Josh Brolin.)
* Angelina Jolie Suffers For Us All in Changeling; Zinedine Zidane
Watches a Good Game in A 21st Century Portrait
I think icon
* Kevin Smith Blows His Wad with Zack and Miri Make a Porno
* Ridley Scott's Body of Lies is the Post-9/11, Tech-Savvy Terror
Thriller We Deserve
Lies we can believe in
* Mike Leigh's Optimistic Heroine in Happy-Go-Lucky Might Just Convince
You to Cheer Up; Lola Montès Still Won't
Female persuasion
Who Wants to Be a
Millionaire? Well, who wouldn't in this economy, even if the currency
in question is rupees and winning the loot means being pegged as a
fraud, getting a firsthand education in "enhanced" interrogation
methods, and having to relive some of the most painful moments of your
past in order to prove your innocence? Such is the fate that greets
Jamal, the 18-year-old Mumbai street urchin turned game-show contestant
at the center of Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, an almost
ridiculously ebullient Bollywood-meets-Hollywood concoction—and one of
the rare "feel-good" movies that actually makes you feel good, as
opposed to merely jerked around.
Based on a novel by former Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup, the film
opens with Jamal (played with terrific chutzpah by newcomer Dev Patel)
already in police custody, accused of somehow cheating during his
appearance on the local version of Millionaire—which, in a nod
to globalization, is all but indistinguishable from its British and
American counterparts. Given the third degree by a tough but ultimately
decent police inspector (the excellent Irfan Khan) who demands to know
how this lowly tea boy (or "chai wallah") from the slums could possibly
know enough to advance to the show's 20-million-rupee final round,
Jamal flashes back over the key events of a life that, quite literally,
contains all the answers. The violent death of Jamal's mother at the
hands of anti-Muslim extremists explains his familiarity with one of
the Millionaire questions; a childhood infatuation with Bollywood movie star
Amitabh Bachchan yet another; and so on.
The potential for a treacly Good Will Hunting of the Mumbai ghetto abounds, but
Boyle and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty)
think more in terms of a minor-scale Dickensian epic (with one major
nod to Dumas): As Jamal journeys down memory lane, the crux of Slumdog
Millionaire becomes the pull of time and tide on the relationship between Jamal,
his artful-dodger brother Salim, and the suitably beautiful,
unattainable Latika (Freida Pinto), the lifelong object of Jamal's
undying affection. It's Jamal's dream to rescue Latika from her current
situation as the semi-willing concubine of a Mumbai underworld
heavy—the same one, as it happens, who has Salim on his payroll.
Zigging to and fro, Slumdog Millionaire whips these familiar
raw ingredients into a feverish masala, at once touristic and something
deeper, that drenches the screen in the sights and sounds of modern
Mumbai: Mischievous children scamper through mazes of corrugated-tin
rooftops; crowds of washerwomen cleanse extravagantly colored fabrics
in outdoor baths; eardrum-rattling traffic chokes the smoggy streets;
trains clatter noisily into busy stations. So intent seems Boyle (and
his ace cameraman, Anthony Dod Mantle) on cramming as much visual and
sonic information as possible into each second of the movie that even
the English subtitles (which appear in colored rectangular boxes during
the Hindi-language scenes) jostle for position in the already densely
packed frames. That sort of hyped-up aesthetic can quickly turn
wearying, as it has in several of Boyle's less successful ventures
(including Shallow Grave and the duly forgotten A Life Less Ordinary),
but here it is a fount of ever-renewable energy. "I am at the center of
the center," Salim tells Jamal as they gaze out over the landscape of
their former slum, now an oasis of skyward-reaching glass-and-steel
towers. And watching Slumdog, you get the sense that, like
Shanghai as seen in the films of Jia Zhangke, this former stretch of
colonial Britain is changing before our eyes faster than even Boyle's
camera can capture it.
A dystopian by nature, whose films regularly move in the direction of entropic
chaos, Boyle resists the natural tug of Slumdog Millionaire toward
happily-ever-after territory, counterbalancing each of Jamal's
triumphs with equal or greater episodes of personal loss and
steadfastly refusing the age-old movie wisdom that love conquers all
(especially money). Yet it's that very tension between gritty,
street-level reality and fairy-tale invention that ultimately makes Slumdog
Millionaire feel even more buoyant and life-affirming. Like so many of the
Bollywood melodramas it stylistically apes, Boyle's film is
unapologetically pop, even as Boyle himself seems to be at once inside
and outside the idiom, embracing it while winking slyly at our
collective need for escapist fantasy. Then, just when you figure he has
pulled out all the stops, Boyle proves to have one more trick left up
his sleeve: a joyous musical number that sends everybody out of the
theater feeling like a winner.
http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-11-12/film/bollywood-meets-hollywood-in-danny-boyle-s-slumdog-millionaire/
