Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008)
November 21st, 2008 | 8 Comments »
Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
dir. Danny Boyle & Loveleen Tandan
wr. Simon Beaufoy (screenplay) & Vikas Swarup (novel)
120 min
UK (English & Hindi w/ English subtitles)
It’s gonna sound like I didn’t enjoy Slumdog Millionaire (2008), but I did. And why not? It’s a well-crafted, feelgood, rags-to-riches-but-the-riches-don’t-matter story with a cast full of brown folk. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that, despite the faces I saw onscreen, this wasn’t India through the eyes of an Indian. Romanticizing third-world poverty with uber-stylized slumchases, Hollywood-style love, at least four M.I.A. songs in its score and a visit to the Taj Mahal, British director Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, Trainspotting) and writer Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) do to Mumbai what Fernando Meirelles did to Rio de Janiero a few years ago. In a nutshell, Slumdog Millionaire is City of God meets Forrest Gump.
Jamal’s (Dev Patel, also played by two younger actors) improbable run on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? is cut short right before the final question. He’s arrested and tortured by a good-cop/bad-cop duo trying to get him to confess to cheating. After all, no “slumdog” could possibly know shit about shit, right? A stoic, resilient do-good child among many, Jamal’s predicament echoes (insert any Dickens’ character here). But as far as winning the prize is concerned, he could care less. And he shouldn’t. To be that naive and aloof in the slum and still live to see adulthood means he’s won the lottery many times over.
It turns out he’s been doing it all for his lost childhood love, Latika (Freida Pinto, stunning in her first major role), who ran off with his thug brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) years ago. Some romantic movies are thinly-veiled socio-political commentary. Others put up a social commentary facade but are, at heart, just a love story. Like this one. What redeems the film’s second-half cheese is the narrative’s framing within a double-flashback device that gives Slumdog its heartbeat; a puzzle forming before our eyes heading toward a foregone conclusion (he gets the girl).
In thoroughly postmodern Slumdog, every poor person is either a power/money-hungry criminal or a noble with a pure heart: the evil findeth death while the noble findeth love, and there is no why – it just is. Mumbai, a rapidly developing city (Salim to Jamal: “Can you believe it? That condo used to be our slum.”) as seen through the eyes of its former colonizer, can be a playground if you let it be. In one scene, Jamal asks Latika why she watches Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, to which she replies: “to escape.” Is this a self-referential statement on the film itself? If so, it makes sense. Slumdog Millionaire doesn’t confront a damn thing and isn’t the groundbreaking cinema people will claim it to be. It’s more like a fun carnival ride. The kind made for visiting tourists.
I was wondering about this movie. It got all sorts of rave reviews but I wondered if it would just gloss over all of the divisions and class make-up of India.
Good review.
November 23rd, 2008 at 2:01 pmI don’t know what’s a bigger misstep: glossing over class/social contradictions or gratuitously using it as a plot device when convenient. For example, Jamal and Salim are Muslim, but their identity only surfaces once – when their mother dies in an anti-Muslim riot. Oh, and when Salim says “God is Great” right before he dies.
November 24th, 2008 at 12:12 pmi don’t think Slumdog Millionaire was meant to be a socio-political commentary. rather, i think it was to be a love story muddled by the complexities of a modernized Indian society.
i was skeptical to see a Mumbai that was glossed and primed for a Hollywood movie but for as much as Danny Boyle can capture through the sensitivity and difficulty of the slums, children, and gangs of Mumbai, he’s done the best and closest i’ve ever seen.
as for the escapism element, that is ALL media in India. there is a reason why Bollywood movies are the way they are and is much more successful than Hollywood. to think that Slumdog Millionaire would ever be a big hit in India would absolutely blow my mind. Mumbai is a bipolar city and people pay to escape from its constant and tiring ironies.
December 6th, 2008 at 12:04 pmi agree with the first statement (wasn’t meant to say anything socio-politically meaningful) but disagree that all Indian media is escapist (though it’s dominant, just like the US and most media run by profiteers). my review is partially in response to all the hype that tries to make it out to be more than it is: a fun, well-crafted romance story.
as for Danny Boyle’s aesthetic approach, I thought that was well done too, if a little forced. Brillante Mendoza (Tirador, Foster Child) and Rahmin Bahrani (Chop Shop) have similar verite-style approaches in similar, impoverished urban settings – but with a more natural, unforced effect with a fraction of a fraction of Boyle’s budget.
December 11th, 2008 at 12:33 am[...] so, I’ve heard a lot of mixed reviews about this film. Some loved it, others were a little more critical. I definitely see both [...]
December 26th, 2008 at 11:35 amScenes of poverty and squalour may appear romantic to Westerners and to our snooty elite but for us ordinary Indians they are nothing new. They are an everyday reality. However, one wonders what sort of mind can find such images aesthetically pleasing. Party-hopping socialites (for example, Shobhaa De after all her bombast of “enough is enough” after the Mumbai attack, went and watched a pirated copy!) who are distanced from such reality may find this film an “eye-opener” but for us it IS poverty-porn. It IS slum-tourism. Leaving that aside, I have eight other objections to the film.
January 29th, 2009 at 8:35 pm1) The director seems to RELISH showing violence. Some of it (like the police-torture) is quite needless. And why was the boy arrested in the first place? On what charge? Was it realistic?
2) How can a boy growing up in slums speak such accented English? Even if one assumes that the language he actually uses to communicate with the game-show host and the police officer is Hindi (granting the director the creative license to use a language better suited for international audiences), there are 2 instances where it is stretched too far: (a) when the boy becomes a ‘guide’ for foreign tourists at the Taj Mahal & (b) when he becomes a substitute-operator at the call-centre.
3) When the boy uses his ‘lifeline’ during the game-show, his friend discovers that she has forgotten her mobile and has to run back for it. This is plain Bollywood masala! Did the director HAVE to make it so melodramatic?
4) How did the boy know who invented the revolver just by watching his brother use it?
How does his friend know about Benjamin Franklin?
5) “Darshan Do Ghanshyam” is NOT written by Surdas. It is written by Gopal Singh Nepali for the movie Narsi Bhagat (1957). This song is also credited as traditional and originally written by 15th century poet Narsi Mehta, whose life that film is based on.
6) After winning the game-show, the boy sits on the railway platform and nobody recognizes him! Considering the popularity of the show, is that realistic?
7) Two glaring omissions: To get invited to the show one has to answer several GK questions over phone or Internet. Even after making it to the show, a contestant can reach the hot-seat only after qualifying through “fastest finger first”. All this is conveniently forgotten in the film.
And of course the greatest flaw in the storyline: programmes like ‘Kaun Banega Crorepati’ and ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’ are NOT telecast live. As a result the entire structure of the film becomes unrealistic. For a film that boasts of being realistic such a flaw cannot be overlooked.
Anyone else wants to say this is a g-r-e-a-t film despite all these flaws?
[...] As someone who has not yet seen the film, I can’t judge it myself, but I will say this: although I’ve heard so much about how amazing the movie is from everyone in the media, people who I know and trust personally don’t seem as enamored by it. Why, just ask Pro Brown. [...]
February 5th, 2009 at 12:39 pmSalim may not have been the “noble”, but he wasn’t portrayed entirely as a power/money-hungry criminal either. He was given his humanity, and portrayed as conflicted. I don’t see the dichotomy you’re painting.
As for whether this film is “ground-breaking” or not…the problem with films that are in any way from the margins and not mainstream – they are judged way too harshly by progressives. The problem is not with the film itself, but with the void in cinema in general of marginalized people. You come out with Slumdog Millionaire, how could we realistically expect that it would make up for all the lack of representation? This movie doesn’t “confront a damn thing” because it’s not meant to. But it’s an important movie in that it brings the margin into the mainstream. And I think expectations need to be lowered about how quickly the margins can become un-marginalized.
But given the dearth of more critical stances on the film, I do think your critique is important to have here.
February 16th, 2009 at 6:44 am