VIEW THIS PAGE Slumdog Millionaire’s sweep at the Oscars can be interpreted in so many ways that it’s hard to know whether to praise the film for its craftsmanship, denounce it as a blatant grab by Hollywood for a piece of the Bollywood movie market, or simply to sniff high-mindedly at yet another cinematic tradition being appropriated and transformed for mainstream Western audiences, in the manner of Crouching Tiger, Sleeping Dragon (臥虎藏龍).
What the movie might achieve in terms of fostering closer movie-making ties with India or in providing an opportunity for Bollywood stars to make a serious bid for a place in Hollywood remains to be seen. What is perfectly evident is that Danny Boyle has directed a magnificent piece of cinematic entertainment. It is perhaps not the groundbreaking work that some have made it out to be — Bollywood has been doing something similar for years, and for that matter, Hollywood did this sort of thing perfectly competently back in the 1930s — but there is an energy and emotional commitment to the characters in Slumdog Millionaire that kicks in right at the beginning of the film and simply never lets up.
Slumdog Millionaire is an old-fashioned story of the trials of true love in a mad, bad world, the strength of the human spirit, the power of hope, and the belief, against all the odds, that things will work out in the end. What it is not is a story about life in the slums of Mumbai.
The film tells the story of Jamal and Selim, two roguish boys from these slums. Their mother is killed in inter-communal violence, they pick up with an orphan girl, Latika, and survive the many perils that life on the streets presents. Selim finds survival through participation in the gangland culture of the slums, and Jamal finds love with Latika. Needless to say, the path of true love never runs smooth. Ultimately it is through Jamal’s participation in a game show that offers cash prizes for correctly answering general knowledge questions that he finally gets the chance of a lifetime and sets the impoverished of the slums from which he emerged dancing in elation.
This is a modern-day fairy tale, but set against a very exotic background of the Mumbai slums. The story, with its young and occasionally rather dense hero, who shines out like a beacon of goodness and light, as all around the strong feed off the weak, has a Dickensian feel. As with Dickens, while a world of intolerable hardship is portrayed, it is also kept at a distance, and even a scene were a young boy has his eyes put out is not the gut-wrenching scene it might have been. Our eye is fixed on whether “our young hero” will escape the same terrible fate.
The game show, which serves to anchor the many flashbacks of Jamal’s life that have led him to this point, is a miniature of the film as a whole, with its suave host Anil Kapoor (Prem Kumar) teasing and bullying Jamal for the delight of the audience, only to see that innocence will eventually triumph, not only in the game show, but also over poverty, corruption and moral turpitude.
The flashbacks provide plenty of color, and Boyle skillfully mixes the humorous with the shocking, walking a line somewhere between gratuitously horrific portrayals of slum life in the style of City of God (2002), and the blandly romanticized slum life of Outsourced (2006). Boyle also spins a rollicking good yarn, and each episode of Jamal’s life does not simply serve to move the story forward, but is often a thoughtfully conceived scenario or charming vignette. These flashbacks are also accompanied by a boisterously carefree score by A.R. Rahman, which takes in musical styles as diverse as bhangra through to Italian opera, underlining the overall theatricality of the production.
While Jamal is the protagonist, he is far from being the most interesting character in the movie. This falls to his brother Selim, to whom it is given to express the more human ambiguities of motive and desire, and portray the grimmer choices of those not buoyed up by love. He is the counterpoint to Jamal the romantic, and his story, though kept in the background, grounds Jamal’s in a semblance of the real world.
Jamal, Selim and love interest Latika are played by three different actors at different stages of their lives, but a remarkable degree of continuity is maintained, and there is no sense of disappointment when emerging stars Dev Patel (Jamal) and Freida Pinto (Latika) take over from the real slum kids who were used to play the roles in early childhood. The use of flashback allows us to continually compare the adult with the child, giving the character roles a greater integrity than a linear narrative would allow.
With his clever use of material, Boyle keeps the tone light without ever becoming fluffy or inconsequential, allowing the story to follow Jamal through the type of coincidences that would be ridiculous in any film that lacked Slumdog’s clever script and tight structure. After all, what some people call coincidence, others call fate, and for all the Jamals of the world, perhaps there is a happy ending being written even as we speak. VIEW THIS PAGE
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