Despite having seen this film multiple times in the theatres (a rarity for me these days), I’ve struggled with what to say about it in this review. Should I reflect on the irony that a British filmmaker working in India has produced one of the great paeans to the “American” dream? Should I compare the film with the previous work of director Danny Boyle? Should I just praise it for its texture, energy and heart? In the end, I think the film will owe its staying power not only to these things, but just as much to a simple recipe: maybe what makes Slumdog Millionaire so exhilarating to a Western audience is its juxtaposition of the familiar with the unfamiliar. This is not a novel technique–we’ve seen it before, whether it comes in the form of a fairly traditional crime thriller spiced with a vigilante hero dressed as a bat, or the classic image of a giant ape batting at biplanes.
The most familiar ingredient here is “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”–originally a British game show, in the past decade it’s gone global, not only here in the States but in dozens of other countries, with little variation. The Indian version of the program serves as an ingenious framework for Slumdog, the story of Jamal, an uneducated young man (Dev Patel) from the sprawling slums of Mumbai who is having improbable success at answering the game show’s trivia questions. Arrested on suspicion that he’s cheating, he is forced to recount the experiences of his life and how they have miraculously provided him with everything he needs to know to win the prize. The inherent drama of the game show parallels the drama of his childhood trials, his troubled relationship with his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) and the quest for the love of his life (Freida Pinto).
The less familiar ingredient (for many viewers) is India itself. Slumdog traverses both the spectacular poverty of Mumbai’s labyrinthine slums and the glittering promise of its skyscrapers. Its characters inhabit shifting landfills where they must recycle to survive, and high-tech call centers where they are drilled in the fine art of sounding Scottish. But even the most insular and untraveled American will find plenty to relate to in Jamal, so long as they can tolerate a few subtitles (probably a third of the dialogue is in Hindi, the rest is in India’s only official language, English). And like some of Danny Boyle’s other films (i.e. the wonderful Millions), while vast amounts of money play a great role in the story, ultimately his characters have to give it up to find happiness. And these days, we’re reminded of what an indispensible message that can be. - [DVD]
Crime/Drama/Romance
Rated R
DVD Release Date: 3/31/09