Slumdog Millionaire
harsh tale still provides a vivid spectacle
2008-12-08
By Sergio Mims

CAST: Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Anil Kapoor, Madhur Mittal
WRITTEN BY Simon Beaufoy
DIRECTED by Danny Boyle

**** FOUR STARS

British director Danny Boyle is a risk taker. He gets that a filmmaker’s primary job is to challenge what’s gone before; to stretch the limits of their imagination and their capabilities.

From science fiction (the sadly overlooked film, Sunshine) to horror (28 Days Later), children’s films (Millions), movies about addiction (Trainspotting), big budget vanity projects (The Beach) and even television ("Inspector Morse" mysteries), Boyle always goes with the unexpected.

His risk taking has never been more in evidence than in his latest film, Slumdog Millionaire. Based on the novel by Vika Swarup, Slumdog tells a truly Dickensian tale of squalor and riches, soul crunching poverty and blinding wealth, cruel brutality, redemptive love, endless despair and hope. It’s a genuine underdog-triumphs-over-adversity, “feel good” movie that’s bursting with an energy and a visually dazzling technique that’s breathtaking.

Boyle once was quoted as saying that his “instinct is to make vivacious films.” Slumdog is loaded with vivid colors, music, and movement and done with such unique style and vitality that the screen can barely contain it all. It’s Boyle’s best film so far and without a doubt one of the best films of the year.

Set in Mumbai (Bombay) India Slumdog chronicles, in a non-linear narrative, the hard scrabble life of Jamal Malik (Patel) a desperately poor kid growing up in the slums of Mumbai, insultingly called a “slumdog” by those better off. In the beginning of the film we find him being tortured by the local police after he wins 1 million
rupees (about $400,000)  on the Indian version of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.”

Convinced that a wretched, undereducated slumdog couldn’t have possibly won without cheating, Jamal eventually explains to the police chief how he was able to answer all the questions, which sets off the film into a series of flashbacks detailing his and his brother Salim’s (Mittal) destitute life and his various experiences from small time jobs to criminal activity to odd and funny situations. In the meantime, his continuing success on the game show turns the good hearted and ambitious Jamal into an overnight media sensation inspiring millions of other slumdogs glued to their TVs , the snarling contempt of the game show host and producer (Kapoor) and a final dramatic confrontation involving his now hoodlum brother Salim.

Boyle and his great cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, clearly inspired by their locale, use both High Def and 35 mm widescreen to take an honest, unflinching look at life and culture in India as well as the dichotomy of the riches and high tech developments existing side by side with hopelessness and grinding poverty.

Using mainly non-professional actors playing the three characters in the early scenes as children, then professionals such as Patel and Pinto and an especially slimy Anil Koopor as the game show host, the cast, to a person, give terrific performances. Along with an extraordinary music score by A.R. Rahman, Slumdog Millionaire, which ends with a Bollywood musical number as the final exhilarating send off, is a marvel of filmmaking and a real joy to behold.

Film critic, lecturer and festival consultant Sergio Mims covers all things film from the city that works, Chicago. He is a regular contributor to ebonyjet.com.