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 (010209)
It doesn't happen often, but when it does, look out: a movie that rocks and
rolls, that transports, startles, delights, shocks, seduces. A movie that is,
quite simply, great.
Slumdog Millionaire, the epic yarn of a Mumbai street urchin who grows up and
goes on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire - and then keeps
getting the answers right, one stunner after another - is that movie. It's
exhilarating. It's life-affirming. (Am I gushing enough?) It's about true love
and destiny, about raging poverty and vast wealth, about the global powerhouse
that is India in the 21st century. And it's about a scrappy hero - a guttersnipe
with resiliency and smarts - who would do Charles Dickens proud.
Directed by Danny Boyle (with a co-directing nod to Loveleen Tandan), Slumdog
Millionaire careens with hyper-kinetic energy - but the constantly moving
camera, jump-cuts, the flashbacks and flash-forwards, the thumping soundtrack,
aren't mere show. They're in service of the narrative, and reflective of its
setting: a country teeming with crowds, a noisy, mad, knockabout place, awash in
color and contradiction.
Played by three actors - Ayush Mahesh Khedekar as the tiny, wide-eyed orphan,
Tanay Hemant Chheda as a wily young teen, and Dev Patel as the stone-serious
18-year-old game show contestant - Jamal Malik is an unschooled, unwashed
product of urban tumult.
How Jamil, a gofer who serves tea - a "chai wallah" - to the phone workers in a
Mumbai call center, landed in the hot seat on the TV show watched by everyone,
and hosted by the acerbic, unctuous and wee-bit-sinister Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor),
is literally the million-dollar question. Make that the 20-million-rupee
question.
Essentially, Jamil has done it for love: Latika (Freida Pinto, in the grown-up
incarnation) is the girl he ran with in the back alleys and orphanages of his
youth, getting into mischief along with his brother Salim. At a certain point in
their childhood, Latika is torn away - she's the prize catch for a prostitution
ring - and Jamil's left with Salim to survive in the squalor. All these years
later, to be a contestant on a show the whole country stops to watch - well,
maybe, just maybe, Latika will be watching, too.
Slumdog Millionaire is structured as a series of flashbacks: 18-year-old Jamil
is in a police interrogation room (for reasons that will become clear), where he
is forced to explain how he came to know the answers that have put him one
question away from winning a mega-sum on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. And then
Boyle, working from a screenplay by Simon Beaufoy (adapting from Vikas Swarup's
novel, Q & A), jumps back to the episode in Jamil's life that led to his having
that knowledge at hand.
Although Slumdog Millionaire - with its grand tableaux and, yes, the Taj Mahal,
even - is on a scale far larger than the British filmmaker has worked before, in
a key way it's very much in keeping with Boyle's body of work. In nearly all of
his films, from his macabre debut noir, Shallow Grave, to his druggy Scots
drama, Trainspotting, to the kid Christmas pic Millions, a bag of money provides
the impetus to the plot. It's a lure, a goal, a reason to fight and feud, to
dream and scheme. Here, the bag of money dangles like a piece of bait - LED
lights signaling the sum - from the game show's Mumbai TV studio.
A story about fate and purpose, Slumdog Millionaire can be dark and frightening,
bloody and gross. (One scene: the young Jamil diving into a pile of human waste
to save a . . . well, ick, ick and ick!) But ultimately, the movie is exuberant,
celebratory. It's impossible not to feel good as the cast kicks up its heels in
a cavernous train station, breaking into song, Bollywood style, as the final
credits roll.
It's the years best film. And that's my final answer.
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