A worthy winner of "Best Picture."

Rating: Null/10 (13 April 2009)

I guess looking back I'd have to say I generally enjoy movies directed by Danny Boyle. "Trainspotting" and "The Beach" just to name a couple of them. Here he brings us a young-love fable set in modern India, the realistic modern India where people make a life the best way they can. The critic Ebert has a very nice, accurate review.
The story focuses on one boy who was orphaned at a very young age when Muslims were attacked at a washing hole and his mom was clubbed to death. That he and his brother managed to escape and survive was just the start of their ordeals. Dev Patel is the teenage Jamal K. Malik.
He makes do the best he can, running a series of relatively harmless scams, often involving tourists. His brother Salim follows a quite darker route and as a young adult is a gangster working for a big gangster. As children they also become friends with a small orphaned girl Latika, who is played later as a young adult by Freida Pinto.
As a young adult Jamal works in a large "bullpen" type of phone sales group, but his job is simple, bringing tea to the others. One day a worked asked him to take is phone station for a few minutes, and Jamal had figured out how to make the call at the right time to get on the "Millionaire" show. He does, and he does very well, answering questions that a "slumdog" like him, someone uneducated, should not be able to answer. So they begin to wonder "how is he cheating?" Eventually 20Million Rupees is at stake, which is about $400,000 US dollars.
Good movie, filmed in an exciting manner and edited interestingly. The story is not told linearly but all comes together easily.
SPOILERS: Jamal even as a young boy fell in love with Latika, but she became separated from them. They grew up apart but he eventually found her, in virtual slavery for the man Salim actually works for. Jamal's real motivation to get on the TV show was to make contact with Latika, because everyone watched it. As the flashbacks show, there was a particular incident in his growing up that contributed to his knowing the answer to each question, like "who invented the revolver" or "who is on the American $100 bill". Still, after one day of the TV show he was taken away and in a sense tortured to reveal how he cheated, but Jamal only told the truth. However the next show when he was faced with the 20Million Rupee question, "the 3rd Musketeer", he didn't know the answer. He guessed, got it right, because of fate. And fate got him and Latika together.