A true winner

Rating: 10/10 (7 February 2009)

After the rather disastrous response to The Beach (which wasn't completely unjustified), genre-hopping director Danny Boyle declared he works best at home, in the UK. How ironic, then, that his best film since Trainspotting - which was released in 1996 - is set in the low-life areas of Mumbai (better known to foreigners as Bombay), India. Then again, Slumdog Millionaire remains an eminently British production since, alongside Boyle, producer Christian Colson (The Descent), writer Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) and star Dev Patel (Skins) were all born and raised in good old England.
The director's versatility pushes itself to the limit, considering the story revolves around the famous TV quiz Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. As the opening title card informs us, a certain Jamal Malik (Patel), is one question short of winning the top prize. How did he do it? The show's sleazy host (Anil Kapoor) is convinced the boy cheated and calls the police, who arrest Jamal as soon as he leaves the studio (the final question will be answered the next day). He is questioned/tortured all night, simply because no one believes an uneducated "slumdog" can be that smart or lucky (and let's not forget the host tried to set him up at one point). Jamal chooses to tell his story, revealing that the clues to the answers are all hidden in the key events of his brief, tragic life.
At this point, the film follows a flashback-based structure: as every question of the quiz is displayed on the screen, Jamal recalls a specific incident that contributed to his current status. We are thus enabled to see the various tricks he and his older brother Salim used to earn money when they were kids, the religious persecution that led to the death of their mother, the multiple challenges in the form of local criminal gangs and, most of all, his pure, honest love for a girl named Latika (played by Freida Pinto in the present day sections). All these elements are connected. Or, as Jamal says: "Maybe it is written.".
Shot with gritty realism on the real streets of Mumbai, the film reeks of hand-held energy and comes off as Boyle's most dynamic and vital movie in a long time. There's a certain similarity between Jamal getting by on the sidewalks and Mark Renton escaping from the police at the beginning of Trainspotting, and Boyle bravely acknowledges the connection by openly inserting a homage to his cult masterpiece's legendary toilet dive scene (the Slumdog Millionaire version takes the concept quite literally). He never looks away when things get ugly, but fundamentally this remains his most uplifting picture to date, so beautiful and touching it almost feels strange to know he nearly turned down the project, based solely on his lack of enthusiasm - to put it mildly - for the quiz aspect of the premise.
The truth is, of course, a whole other thing: the game element is merely a MacGuffin, an abstract factor that serves only one purpose, namely starting the story and thus leaving room for the extraordinary circumstances under which Jamal, Salim, Latika and dozens of other children had to (and still have to) survive. In the end, no one really cares whether Jamal will win the top prize or not (although Boyle deserves credit for making the quiz sequences even more suspenseful than they are in real life); what matters is his story, the human story, the one everyone can relate to on some level.
Ultimately, the victory that counts is off-screen: it's the artistic triumph of one man, who against all odds (given his rather dark back catalogue) delivered the feel-good movie of the decade. Calling him a millionaire is a tad inappropriate (the film was made on a shoestring budget), but thanks to this amazing story, Danny Boyle is a real winner.