The feel-bad movie of the year

Rating: 4/10 (17 May 2009)

"The feel-good movie of the year!" promises the quote headlined on the DVD jacket; and that certainly was how the movie was sold. Remembering previous movies directed by Danny Boyle--stories about miserable people in dead-end situations--I wondered what his idea of a feel-good movie would be.
I found out soon enough: a story about even more miserable people at a dead end even more definite; a story that begins in torture and ends in a double murder, with betrayal, abduction, theft, robbery, mutilation, and more murders along the way. The movie's claim to feel-good status rests on a "happy ending" that takes up perhaps five minutes and feels more like an appendix, the story proper having concluded as it commenced, i.e. miserably. The ending didn't make me feel good, and I don't see how it could inspire such a feeling in anyone who was paying it close attention.
How did it make me feel? Confused; because it seemed to follow from nothing that had preceded. The boy and the girl live happily ever after, in prosperity and contentment--but no, that isn't actually the ending; that's only our inference from the ending. The movie doesn't show it, and what a movie doesn't show in effect doesn't happen. The actual ending is that the boy and the girl meet and kiss. And even that is...well, what is it? It isn't realistic, and can't have been intended to be taken as such. But neither is it romantic, since the movie lacks the layer of sentiment that such an ending would require. It isn't fantastical, and it isn't satirical. In fact, it makes no sense, however you try to read it.
The inexplicableness of the conclusion led me to look back at the story more critically, and when I did I found it the same all through. I don't know what mode it's supposed to be in. It's based on what sounds like the "happy idea" of traditional comedy: a poor boy competes in a TV quiz show and amazes everyone by knowing all the answers, since every one of them is something he has discovered during one of the major events in his life. But the movie isn't a comedy. And supposing it were, I still wouldn't know what the point of the idea was. Again, it clearly isn't an observation from real life. Is it intended as an optimistic statement, showing that all experience yields knowledge? Or as darkly comic, showing that after the many horrors the boy has endured, all he has to show for it is a few negligible bits of trivia? Or as inspirational, in that he turns a life of defeats into victory? One can only guess.
The best clue the movie offers is the structure, as far as it can be discerned in spite of the director's efforts to fragment it. From it I would guess that the original novel was a step or two distant from reality. The story is laid out in a series of discrete episodes from the boy's life, each containing the answer to one of the questions on the quiz show. In the movie we hear the question, we see the flashback relating to it, and then we flash-forward again to the answer. This seems more artificial and tedious when acted out literally than it would on the page. And paradoxically, the movie's attempts to disguise its repetitiveness only make it seem more intrusive. Had it been treated in the same way as a recurring pattern in music, it might have given the movie a solid form. As it is, it's constantly broken up: sometimes we're in the TV studio as the quiz show is going on, sometimes we're in a police station watching it; the shifts are so random that often we don't know where or when we are. In fact, it wasn't until well into the film that I grasped the boy wasn't only replaying his life in memory, he was also telling it to the police. Once we know this, we can't be sure whether we're seeing events as he's recollecting them, as he's recounting them, or as they originally happened. Clarity appears not to have been the director's primary objective.
What he does seem to have been after is to keep things moving. And he does succeed at that. This is a running, jumping, and not-standing-still film. For instance, it contains two street chases that go on much longer than needed--if either sequence were needed--with no apparent purpose other than to add some physical action. The scenes of violence raise the same suspicion, and come off seeming sensationalized, however undoubted the reality they reflect. Probably Boyle has a genuine concern for the victims he portrays, but his hyping of the atrocities they have to endure tends to call that into question, as does the fact that the same kinds of bad things happen in his zombie and space movies as in this purported social document. And frankly, I couldn't help feeling that a lot of it was just the director superimposing himself onto the material. At the end, indeed, he does so almost literally. In what would have an enjoyable dance number in the Bollywood style, he continually pastes credits on top of the dancers, as well as cutting away from them every few seconds. He seems unable to keep himself out of it.
Similarly, he hashes up the narrative, jumping from one stage of the boy's life to the next, while paying scant attention to how he got from one to the other, and never slowing down enough to show what he feels and thinks. That is especially true when it comes his relations with his brother, so critical to the story, which are depicted only in the most generalized and movie-ish way.
If I'm going to watch a meaningless movie, I'd rather it were a feel-better one.