Works better as an India travelogue than as inspiring drama

Rating: 7/10 (1 January 2009)

"Slumdog Millionaire" uses a clever narrative strategy to tell the life story of Jamal Malik, an 18-year-old former slum kid, and at first, that was one of the things I liked best about the movie. When Jamal wins ten million rupees on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?", the police don't believe he could have done it without cheating, so he must explain how he came to know the answers. Cue a series of flashbacks of Jamal's life, each of them incorporating the answer to one of the game show questions. It's an innovative way to tell a story, and the flashbacks are all exciting and dramatic. Jamal has confronted murderous religious mobs, sinister orphanage-keepers, and tough modern gangsters in his young life.
But the suspense disappears somewhat when you realize that no matter how much filth and poverty Jamal encounters, no matter how many villains pursue him, he will survive to appear on the game show. Furthermore, it becomes increasingly clear that Jamal's story is a fairy tale, and that destiny is going to work in mysterious but positive ways to make sure that everything turns out all right.
Thus "Slumdog Millionaire" works better as a tour of modern India than as a story about Jamal Malik. There is a terrific montage sequence set on a train, an interlude at the Taj Mahal, and some thought-provoking scenes of the gentrification of Mumbai. Meanwhile, the movie also gives an un-sugarcoated look at some of India's major social ills: religious conflict, extreme poverty, and prostitution/exploitation. Danny Boyle manages to fit this all together by directing everything in an exuberant, colorful, quick-cutting style. Even the subtitles are playful and color-tinted! (Most of the film is in English, except for the scenes where Jamal is a very small child and speaks Hindi.)
Dev Patel, who plays Jamal at 18, has an open, innocent face and frequently seems a little out of his depth. This quality is useful during the game-show scenes, when Jamal is in the hot seat and dazed by his own success. But he otherwise seems like a nice suburban kid: someone who witnessed the horrors that the younger Jamal has seen should be both grittier and more soulful. The same goes for Freida Pinto, who plays Jamal's love interest Latika: she is a very pretty young woman but hard to believe as a former street waif. Additionally, Latika is not given much of a personality, which makes the love story hard to really cheer for.
Ultimately, "Slumdog Millionaire" failed to move me, despite how hard it tried to do so. The flashy cinematography and propulsive action made the movie fun to watch, but also made it difficult to connect emotionally with the characters. And although the movie is meant to be the inspiring story of an underdog who triumphs, it makes clear that Jamal succeeds because destiny has chosen to smile upon him. He's a good-hearted and sympathetic boy, but a passive character in his own life. "Slumdog Millionaire" wants us to think "It's OK that Jamal suffered all these hardships, because it enabled him to win millions of rupees and the girl of his dreams," but what about all the other Indian slum kids who suffer with no hope of relief, whom Fate has not chosen to favor?