The beauty of excess

Rating: 10/10 (10 October 2009)

Young Jamal, born and raised in the slums of Mumbai, is one question away from winning the top prize at "Who wants to be a millionaire?", but how did he get that far? The first time I saw a Danny Boyle film, "Trainspotting" to be precise, I felt awful, as if the crude depiction of Scottish poverty had opened a dark abyss in my soul. I tried again with "A life less ordinary", which the critics hated and I absolutely loved, mainly because of the eye-opening "irony gone wild" experience it was for me in regard to the famous saying "men are from Mars, women are from Venus". Excess, a typically Boylian trait, is also the essential premise of "Slumdog Millionaire", although it takes on a very different meaning, as opposed to Boyle's earlier work. In the slums of Mumbai excess is nothing if not crude reality itself : the filth, the hollowing despair and the merciless violence which reign over the people who are trapped in that life all add up to this disturbingly realistic portrait which Anthony Dod Mantle's brilliant photography empathizes with. However, you might feel, at this point, that I'm describing a very well-made documentary and let me tell you immediately that is not so. A story like this one needed to fly by letting imagination run wild with its creative force and only a director prone to excess by definition and, at the same time, morbidly attracted to the darkest depths of civilization could pull off the task at hand. Luckily, Danny Boyle was the perfect man for the job and the final result is, in my opinion, a masterpiece in the contemporary panorama of the art of cinema. A special mention goes out to Chris Dickens's nail-biting editing and to A.R. Nahman's score, literally capable of controlling the blood flow of any human being subject to its rhythm. On the other hand, Simon Beaufoy's script gets rid of any form of rhetoric, seeps through that particular kind of humour which allows the audience to laugh in the very midst of tragedy, winks at Bollywood near the end, speaks through the eyes of a child in the first part and constructs a sturdy family drama with an epic feel to it in the middle. The actors, virtually unknown on our side of the world, are excellent and the crown jewel is the young Dev Patel, who plays the main character Jamal, whose intensity manages to get across what an interminable number of pages of monologuing could not. While the end titles rolled I was flustered and overjoyed, red with excitement and dancing to the music against my rational self and my suggestion to all of you, before I bring about my final thoughts on this film, is to go and watch this in a cinema (or movie theatre, whatever they call it these days) in order to get the full experience of this mind-blowing tale. Another major player in the current award season is "The curious case of Benjamin Button" and if you catch both films I encourage you to reflect upon the concept of "epic", they stand for two diametrically opposite ideas of what such a concept should mean. I do not presume to lend you golden drops from the tree of wisdom, but I would still like to base my final comment on this aspect. It seems clear to me that this film has an epic feel to it, since it's ultimately a long and star-crossed love story, transcending the immense suffering of he who treads the path to get "from slums to success", in the words of histrionic and ambiguous TV show host Prem Kumar and ascending to the role of constant guiding light in every heroic gesture, unconventionally speaking, made by Jamal.