Slumming it
An upbeat fantasy heated to a Boyle
By Andy Klein 12/24/2008
Slumdog Millionaire
Starring Dev Patel, Anil Kapoor, Freida Pinto Directed by Danny Boyle
Rated R, 120 min.
The opening sequence of Slumdog Millionaire, the surprising new film from Scottish director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later), intercuts shots of a diffident young man named Jamal (Dev Patel) — about to face the big question on the popular Indian edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? — with shots of the same young man getting the living crap beaten out of him by a police inspector and his minion. The juxtaposition is an announcement of the tone of the film to come: an upbeat, Hollywood-style fairy tale marked by occasional, sudden bursts of really gruesome violence and downbeat social realism.
Jamal is a humble tea-runner at a Verizon call center in Mumbai. He is also uneducated, a Muslim, relatively dark-skinned and from a completely impoverished background, which is why he’s being beaten and even tortured with electricity. In the eyes of his captors (and of the TV show’s makers,) he must be cheating. How could such a slumdog possibly know all these answers?
When he fails to confess — since, as the audience already assumes, he isn’t cheating — the cops force him to explain how he knows so much. They play back video of Jamal’s performance, pausing after each question for an explanation. Luckily for the film, the questions (with one or two exceptions) come in just the right order for Jamal’s answers to constitute the autobiographical flashback that makes up the bulk of the running time.
In brief, the story begins as the 6-year-old Jamal and his older brother Salim, barely escape one of the horrifying Hindu pogroms against Muslims. After teaming up with an adorable little girl named Latika, they are press-ganged into a team of child beggars, whose adult masters soon prove to be far less benevolent than they initially appear. The boys escape again, but Jamal keeps in his heart the goal of returning to free Latika.
Danny Boyle is far from the first person I would think of for a fairy tale project. Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy is practically the anti-Boyle. Famous for the lovable The Full Monty (1997), most of his later scripts fall into the same vein. It is the tension between Beaufoy and Boyle’s disparate inclinations that gives Slumdog Millionaire most of its texture. As the need for a neat, happy ending approaches, Boyle necessarily drops his bleak outlook.
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