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Slumdog Millionaire
It’s the feel-good movie about torture, child exploitation and poverty!
2008
Review: December 16, 2008
Director: Danny Boyle
Starring: Dev Patel, Anil Kapoor, Saurabh Shukla, Freida Pinto
Up to you.
THE SETUP:
Massive winner of India’s version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire relates his story.
DISCUSSION:
I had some serious reservations about seeing this, most of which related to director Danny Boyle, who, Sunshine notwithstanding, I generally don’t like. Plus this one looked fairly sentimental, and I couldn’t get a clear picture of what it was about. Still, friends of mine kept hearing raves about it, and wanted to go, so along with them I went.
We open in Mumbai in 2006, with our hero, Jamal, being tortured in a police station. He was a big winner on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and since he is a “Slumdog” Chai-Wallah [a guy who serves tea in an office], the police think he must be cheating, since he couldn’t possibly know the answers to all the questions. Eventually they cut him down and remove the electrodes, pop in a tape of his time on the show, and he goes through, question by question, to tell how he knew the answers.
We see his youth in a vast slum, and his brother Salim locking him in an outhouse while the huge Bollywood star he’s a fan of comes to visit. He escapes through the bottom, covered in feces, and gets the star’s autograph, which his brother then takes and sells. Their mother is killed by anti-Islamists. They leave the city by train and wander the countryside, and are soon joined by a girl their age, Latika. They scavenge in a huge junkyard, and are finally taken in by a nice man that feeds and houses them.
SPOILERS > > >
The nice man drives the droves of kids into the city and sets them loose to beg. Soon Salim sees the man blinding one of the kids by pouring acid in his eyes [because blind street singers earn more], and the two brothers escape, while Latika gives up at the last second and remains behind. Thus begins a lifelong obsession for Jamal with whom he considers to be the love of his life.
The two brothers end up at the Taj Mahal, giving tours and stealing tourists’ shoes. They grow into teenagers. They find Latika again, still exploited by the guy, and Salim finds a gun and shoots him. With the gun, he joins a gangster’s mob, and takes possession of Latika for himself. He and Jamal have a huge break, going their separate ways.
As adults, Jamal finds Salim again, and through him, Latika. The last quarter of the film is his quest to free her from the gangster and take off with her. It all suddenly becomes very conventional and crowd-pleasing, including a rousing romantic ending [suddenly the massively crowded Mumbai train station clears out for their reunion!], and they have a joyous Bollywood production number over the end credits.
< < < SPOILERS END
The movie has an ingenious narrative device, which is that we see him answer a question on the game show, then flash back to find out how he knew the answer to that question. It works well, and you don’t really question the magical coincidence that the order of the questions should chronologically match the events of Jamal’s life. And for long stretches the movie is fascinating, and funny, and lively. And it seems that one of the points of the film [and I suppose the novel it's adpated from] is to give a guided tour of the real India, since we do seem to hit all the major social issues. But then the final quarter gets SO conventional, SO crowd-pleasing, that either you continue to love it, or it starts to curdle a bit. It’s the same old thing about true, everlasting love that lasts from the age of seven or so and ends up with HUGE emotional moments and near-misses and a big HUGE group hug of a finale!
As an aside, it seems to me that if one fell in love at the age of seven and remained so psychologically undeveloped that you were unvaryingly in love, with someone you have barely spent any mature time with, until the age of 25 or so, that would be a good argument that perhaps one should be shot.
Anyway, you’ll walk out singing! And then you’ll think—wait a minute, what about all the torture? The child exploitation? The government corruption? The sexual servitude? The anti-Muslim immolations? Is that all a great big part of this feel-good fabric? I’m not sure the film is exploiting all these topics, it’s just that they don’t fit very comfortably [or that they fit unnervingly comfortably] within a story that starts out as Oliver Twist and ends up as Miss Congeniality.
So of my two friends I attended with, one hated it, and one loved it. The one who hated it asked me why I thought it was so popular amongst the general public, and I said I think that people can come in—possibly after a long day of holiday shopping—and see India, so they feel like they’ve seen something exotic, and see slums and torture, so they feel like they’ve seen something serious and realistic, and then it ends up with a giant big soppy love story, so they can walk out saying that not only did they see this serious, realistic movie, with like torture and stuff, that takes place in India—but they LOVED it! And that makes them all feel like generally better people. And yeah, I think that’s what this movie has got to sell.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
I don’t think you need to, but it won’t kill you.
