Good but not Great

Rating: 9/10 (27 March 2009)

One never knows what goes through the collective mind of Oscar voters but one suspects that it is the squalor of India -- in this case, Mumbai, though it can also be seen virtually anywhere -- that won this film the Best Picture Award rather than the love story or the contrived "Who Wants to a Millionaire" mechanism that contributes the title. Freida Pinto and Dev Patel are a handsome couple, and Danny Boyle is an accomplished director but the star here is the settings and the cinematography which capture the vitality, poverty and violence of the city. The most famous of Mumbai/Bombay landmarks are not shown (or I missed them if they were). Instead of the scenic tour the viewer is confronted with the slums and the impoverished children and the harsh life they lead. One supposes that the love story was required to lift this film out of the documentary realm but it is the reality, not the fictional frame, that delivers the wallop in this film. The quiz show maintains a modicum of tension but one knows how it will come out in fiction if not in fact and the reunion of the young lovers is foreordained -- a Hollywood flower grafted onto a Bollywood stem.