enjoyable if occasionally outlandish melodrama

Rating: 8/10 (14 June 2009)

Winner of eight Academy Awards, including one for Best Picture of 2008, "Slumdog Millionaire" is like a Charles Dickens story updated to the techno-savvy 21st Century. The movie focuses on a trio of impoverished orphans living and loving and contending with a slew of heartless villains in the slums of Mumbai, India. Jamal, his older brother, Salim, and their compatriot, Latika, a young girl they take under their wing, undergo enormous trials and tribulations as they struggle to survive in a world that has pretty much abandoned them to the vagaries of fate. In true Dickensian fashion, the story also provides generous doses of melodrama, implausible coincidences, hairbreadth escapes and heart-tugging sentimentality to help mitigate the suffering.
Based on the novel "Q & A" by Vikas Swarup, the movie starts off with a now 18-year-old Jamal being interrogated - and, indeed, tortured - by the Indian authorities who don't believe that an ordinary kid from the slums could be racking up so much money as a contestant on "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?" (he's fast approaching the 20,000,000 rupee mark) without somehow cheating. With this unlikely but clever narrative device serving as a framework, the movie then travels back in time to show the skeptical police investigator just how it is that Jamal does indeed happen to know the answers to all those questions.
Written by Simon Beaufoy and co-directed by Loveleen Tandan and Danny Boyle ("Trainspotting," "28 Days Later"), "Slumdog Millionaire" somehow manages to push the envelope in the areas of plausibility and credibility without sacrificing its authenticity in the process. One moment it may be being brutally honest in its depiction of the effects of grinding poverty and cruelty on the human body and spirit - and the next it's indulging in the veriest of feel-good fantasies, as Jamal stands on the brink of the ultimate rags-to-riches fable, getting both the money and the girl, in the best Horatio Algers tradition. Yet, the movie never feels exploitative or compromised as a result of this dichotomy - a dichotomy, in fact, that clearly reflects the Indian culture of both wealth and poverty, traditionalism and modernity from which the story arises.
The flashiness of the editing and the liveliness of the directing keep the film hurtling ahead at a breakneck pace, while the cast of mainly amateur actors - playing the children at various ages - engages our sympathy from the outset. Dev Patel and the gorgeous Freida Pinto are both splendid as the oldest incarnations of the two main characters. And don't step out before the closing credits, a fun and lively bit of Bollywood hoopla designed to send audiences out of the theater with a spring in their steps and a smile on their faces - a smile that is well and honestly earned, I must say.