Movie Review: Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

The flashing lights. The cheesy music. The mooning, needy host, desperately clinging to his last bit of relevance. I hate most network primetime game shows for plenty of reasons, but my biggest pet peeve, without question, are the participants. When a person on "Deal or No Deal" is offered six figures to stop choosing briefcases at random, a once-in-a-lifetime offer, and they do the unthinkable and refuse because they’re convinced their next briefcase is going to be one of a low denomination, I want them to fail. When a person exhausts their lifelines on a blindingly easy question, I hope the next one they face is one even I don’t get. If game shows were a window to the soul, they’d reveal that I’m a pretty terrible person; so I stopped watching them.

That’s one of the many reasons I was surprised with Danny Boyle’s Academy Award winning 2008 effort Slumdog Millionaire: Not only did I want Jamal (Dev Patel)to win the money, get the girl, and dance his ass off, I was heavily invested in his doing so. Never in my wildest imagination would I ever think that the traditional camera and music gimmickry of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" (a universal language, even if currency isn't) would have me gripping the armrests of my chair, but there I was, doing just that.

Of course, there's more to Slumdog Millionaire than the game show scenes; there is a story behind how Jamal got to be in the hot seat, and it is as fascinating as it is sad.

Yes, I found the movie to be sad. Not life-affirming. Not heartwarming. Not a tender love note written and sealed with soft kisses to the nature of the human spirit. Slumdog Millionaire has a happy ending, but everything leading up to that fairy tale ending exists in a pure, Dickensian nightmare world. I left the film happy, feeling good about what transpired, but a limp-wristed tearjerker this isn't - DVD blurb writing defies it.

The movie's framework is thus: Jamal, an unlikely contestant on the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" answers a series of questions that no person raised in the slums of India should know. Some Americans, if quizzed, would guess that Andrew Jackson was the subject of the first digital presidential portrait, so why would Jamal know who was on the American $100 bill? How could he know that without knowing who was on the 1,000 rupee bill (Ghandi)? The police, and the show's host (Anil Kapoor, whose pronunciation of "Millionaire" really is heartwarming) suspect he is cheating and interrogations commence to get to the root of the problem, all before the show Jamal might just pull it out on.

As it happens, Jamal's life experiences are the reason he knows the answers to all of these questions. Flashbacks detail not only how he knows the answer to these questions, but why they matter to him - all of them are tied to one experience or another in his life, a tragic one that sees his mother die in a riot, his brother become a gangster, and his best friend/soul mate stolen away for future prostitution. Jamal has been trying to pick up the pieces for 20 years. He appears on "Millionaire" not for the chance to become one, but because he knows Latika (Freida Pinto), the soul mate, watches regularly.

This is a film with many ambitions. It rarely misses the mark. This is a film bursting with subplots. It doesn't forget any of them. This is a film that takes risks. They were certainly rewarding.

What can you say about the performances of the film's untrained, unwashed child stars, plucked from the slums of Mumbai? They carry much of the film's weight, waging an epic struggle against their harsh reality, not knowing just how rough they really have it. For every indignity they suffer, there is a smile. For every atrocity they witness, there is some moment of happiness - the kids are still kids, until they're forced to grow up. Even then, there are young adults who are corrupted and killed, and there are those who refuse to be.

The scenes involving the children are shot mostly using Dutch angles. On the Wikipedia article for the technique, an unverified claim has it that there are more Dutch angle shots than ones where the camera is level. Those shots lend a largeness to the flashbacks, the same sort of largeness most people lend to their own childhood memories. There's another reason for those shots, I think: Distorting the world around Jamal, Latika, and Salim serves to illustrate the impossible world they were dealing with at an age where the concern of most American children is getting another hour in front of their X-Box 360.

This is not a perfect movie. The cynic in me says that the ending was contrived and that the Bollywood-lite dancing at the end of the movie robbed the film of some of its gravitas, even if it put a big, goofy grin on my face. The movie left me wanting to know more. How does Jamal deal with his sudden fame? How do the mob associates deal with a late-movie bloodbath? Danny Boyle wraps this movie up with nice, shiny paper and a big, red bow, but there were elements of the story that begged for more than the story book ending it was given. I understand why this was the life-affirming movie of 2008: Walking out of the theater to the strains of "Jai Ho" amidst cute dancing and smiling people evokes good feelings. My only hope is that the people who see this movie wake up remembering the two hour nightmare that preceded that finish. What’s the use of a fairy tale ending without the struggle that came before?



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