Bollywood Dickens

Rating: 7/10 (7 January 2009)

Like 2007's Juno, Slumdog Millionaire is essentially a feel-good film by a good director that is given much more credit than is due. Juno was cute like an emasculated Wes Anderson film. Slumdog is like modern live-action Disney film in spite of its violence, which hardly rivals what Disney films have been doing recently. This fictional biography is based entirely upon deus ex machina. It is concerned with building a harmonious world founded on the marble floors of dreamy ideologies and sated with a pleasant, immediately gratifying style.
Danny Boyle's $15 million Hindi fairy tale radiates with the feeling of a call to action. This is a breathlessly paced film, moving all around the emotional map, about a Mumbai orphan who emerges from the slums on the might of his sparkling ability to retain minutiae. The story's shy, pure and heroic protagonist reaches remarkable, vindicating heights merely with the mental and social experience of being a slumdog. He is a beacon of idealism for the hopeful masses. What I admire objectively is that this hyperkinetic melodrama's general allure will acquaint millions of moviegoers with the real India for the first time.
We react to the tragedy of the India of social classes that appear as if to be estranged by dimensions. A woman crawls from a cardboard box. Men bathe at a fire hydrant. People excrete waste on the sidewalk. On the other hand, the world's largest middle class, mostly lower-middle, but all the more highly regarded. Millionaires. Mercedes-Benzes and Audis. Luxury condos. Education is bursting at the seams. A thriving computer section. A cascade of doctors and neurosurgeons.
Complete with a musical sequence at the end, but also an early scene of electric shock torture, Boyle's rags-to-riches tale balances these two Indias by cutting between a hell of destitution and predation and the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. It tells the story of an orphan from the slums of Mumbai who is born into a brutal existence. A petty thief, impostor and survivor, mired in dire poverty, he improvises his way up through the world and remembers everything he has learned. He finds a small place in the Mumbai gangland, and even falls in idealized love with a girl who keeps eluding him.
Sort of an Indian City of God, the film's flashback storytelling follows his life until his appearance as the show contestant. At the point in his life where he is a contestant on the show, the film takes on a Bollywood-laced magical prestige. Proposed as a "slumdog," he gives the correct answer to question after question and becomes a nationalized idol to audiences who are watching the show live. The flashbacks show the experiences through which he happened to pick up the observations that are now winning him millions of dollars. He doesn't volunteer this astonishing information. The film opens as it's beaten out of him by the show's sweaty, violent security staff. They are convinced he must have stolen the answers.
This crowd-pleaser, scripted with a brisk pace by Simon Beaufoy, uses attention-grabbing cinematography by Boyle's regular DP Anthony Dod Mantle, Chris Dickens's machine-gun- speed editing, and Boyle's trademark energized, driving, uber-modern soundtrack. One could expect from that description a gimmicky film directed by an insecure show-off. But Danny Boyle is one director whose films are made in that style and yet, like a more diplomatic Spike Lee, our abstract familiarity with delight and social ecstasy are stimulated by his work, even by his lesser films such as The Beach and A Life Less Ordinary. Slumdog Millionaire has no underpinnings beneath the marble floors of dreamy ideologies and immediately gratifying style, but I can't deny that it does have that Danny Boyle touch.