Slumdog Millionaire Buy posters from this movie by Peter Sobczynski
"The Best Thing To Happen To A Game Show Since Gene Rayburn" “Slumdog Millionaire” is a film that is largely set amidst the crushing poverty of India and centers on a young man who, as his story progresses, sees his mother brutally killed before his eyes during a riot, is repeatedly betrayed by both his older brother and the girl that he loves, is beaten and tortured by the police for the crime of doing well on a game show and is even at one point locked inside of an outhouse and forced to use the business end in order to escape. To hear all of that, you might logically assume that the film is a singularly depressing work designed solely to make the few viewers it might somehow manage to attract feel as bummed out as humanly possible by the time that the end credits roll. And yet, not only is it not the kind of dreary cinematic drudgework that it may appear to be on first glance, it is one of the most completely endearing and crowd-pleasing films that I have seen this year and what is even more astonishing is that it achieves that without ignoring or sugarcoating the more melodramatic moments that I have cited above. The film opens with nearly all of the eyes of India firmly fixed upon Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), an 18-year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai who has somehow found his way into the hot seat on the country’s version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Not only is he on the show, he has had an extraordinary run in which he has correctly answered one seemingly impossible-to-answer question after another. To many people, in fact, he is doing too good and the fact that an uneducated kid from the streets is somehow managing to answer every question correctly--even after being supplied with a false answer by the show’s unctuous host during a break--is proof positive that he is somehow cheating. When the show ends for the day, with Jamal set to return the next day for a final question worth 20,000,000 rupees, our hero is not taken to a nearby hotel to rest, relax and prepare for tomorrow. Instead, he is grabbed by the police and whisked away to the nearest station where they begin beating and torturing him in order to get him to admit that he has been cheating. Not only does Jamal deny cheating, he claims that he has absolutely no interest in the enormous prize that he is poised to win the next day. Desperate to prove his innocence to his captors, he begins to explain how it was that he came to know the answers to all of those disparate questions by relating his life story, an occasionally cruel and occasionally charming tale in which each of the chapters he recounts winds up tying in with one of the questions he was asked--the famous movie star he is asked to name, for example, is the same one that Jamal had to make that messy outhouse escape in order to meet. As his tale continues, we learn more about his life, including the older brother, Salim (Madhur Mittal), who wound up abandoning his brother for a life of crime and easy riches and the beautiful fellow orphan Latika (Freida Pinto) who stole his heart at an early age before leaving him to fall in with the wrong people himself, and how he has managed to make it so far in the game. However, while Jamal is able to eventually convince the chief police inspector (Irfan Khan) that he is coming up with the answers on his own, there are a couple of questions that he refuses to answer as the clock ticks down to the next day‘s broadcast--what is someone with no professed interest in big money or fame doing on the show in the first place and why is it so important that they return for the finale? With its sprawling storyline that largely involves young children being forced to gingerly negotiate their ways through worlds filled with violence, corruption, heartbreak and moral conundrums in which good is not necessarily rewarded as much as evil, you might at first think that “Slumdog Millionaire” should be filed alongside the likes of “Pixote,” “City of God” or even the granddaddy of this subgenre, “Oliver Twist.” While Simon Beaufoy’s adaptation of the Vikas Swarup novel does do an effective job of conveying both the horror of growing up in such an environment (especially in the terrifying sequence when Jamal and his brother fall in with a man who has organized young beggars to work for him that seems swell at first until the guy decides that Jamal would be more effective with one of his eyes gouged out) and the surreal ways in which extreme wealth and extreme poverty can rub shoulders in a country like India (towards the end, Jamal stares ruefully at his old slum neighborhood, now the location for a number of garishly expensive skyscrapers), its ambitions are far greater than that. It also wants to tell the story of Jamal’s great love for Latika and his far more troubled relationship with his brother while simultaneously depicting the multi-media madness that Jamal’s run on the TV show inspires throughout the entire country. That is a lot for any screenwriter to bite off but Beaufoy has spun all of these elements together into a final product that is so beautifully put together that you don’t even realize quite how ambitious it is or how many plates he has spinning in the air until the film is over and you begin to think back on what you just saw. It is a great piece of screenwriting--the kind of storytelling that manages to take a finale in which the results seem more or less preordained and bring a genuine sense of suspense to the proceedings. “Slumdog Millionaire” was directed by Danny Boyle and it offers further proof to the claim that he is one of the most adventurous filmmakers at work today--not only has he made such an extraordinarily eclectic range of films as “Trainspotting,” “A Life Less Ordinary,” “28 Days Later,” “Millions” and “Sunshine” (at least the last two-thirds of the latter) during his career, he has managed to pretty much pull them off thanks to his ability to tell a story in a clean and direct manner while still managing to infuse it with an elaborate and eye-catching visual style. Right from the start, “Slumdog Millionaire” is a riot of sound and vision as he and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle capture and contrast the goofy garishness of the TV show with a vision of the slums of Jamal’s childhood that is both desperately sad in its poverty and yet somehow thrilling in the way that they are teeming with life in virtually every corner. As the film progresses throughout Jamal’s hardscrabble life, it begins to take on the shadings of a genuine epic but at the same time, Boyle never allows the spectacle to overwhelm the human heart at the center or his story. (Much of this is due to the lovely set of actors that Boyle has chosen to play his main characters at various ages--for once, they actual feel as if they are all playing the same person.) He also does a marvelous job of juggling the numerous plot ideas and emotional tones found in Beaufoy’s screenplay--comedy flows into tragedy and vice-versa in such a fluid manner that whenever one of the two is at the forefront, the other is never too far behind so that neither of them winds up dominating the proceedings and throwing the film’s delicate balance out of whack. It is an amazing ambitious work, even for a filmmaker who has never been known for shying away from a challenge, and the result is, with the possible exception of the wondrous children’s film “Millions,” the best and most completely satisfying thing that he has ever done; even the finale, which has often been his weak spot in his earlier works, comes off perfectly this time around. Of course, while more discerning viewers will presumably flock to it in droves, there is the possibility that the mass audiences might wind up giving “Slumdog Millionaire” a pass thanks to the less-than-catchy title, the lack of any known performers and the fact that roughly a third of the film (mostly the sequences involving the youngest incarnations of the main characters) is in Hindi with English subtitles. In response, all I can say is that the title perfectly evokes the film, the performers are so charming and charismatic that you will hardly notice that you don’t know them and that while overlooking them may cause you to miss some details, the basic story is so simple and strong that you hardly need to read the subtitles to know what is going on. From its vibrant opening frames to the exhilarating musical number that brings it to a close, “Slumdog Millionaire” is an absolute delight throughout and I cannot imagine the possibility of a viewer sitting through it without completely succumbing to its massive charms. del.icio.us link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=17382&reviewer=389
