Slumdog Millionaire Review, Telluride 2008
By Kevin Buist
posted 5 days ago
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Danny Boyle’s latest offering, Slumdog Millionaire, is generating a fair amount
of buzz here at Telluride. Not unlike last year’s Juno, the film showed up in
one of the mysterious TBA slots, delighting audiences made weary by a slate of
good but somewhat depressing films, such asHunger, Waltz with Bashir and Adam
Resurrected. Slumdog Millionaire follows the story of Jamal Malik, an unlikely
winner of India’s version ofWho Wants to be a Millionaire. Jamal, his brother
Samir, and fellow orphan Latika, manage to survive an almost absurd number of
scrapes, the memory of each one coincidentally providing Jamal with answers to
the game show questions. The film is big, fast, fun, and colorful, but
ultimately a mess.
The hyperactive structure of the film is born out of the life
experience-equals-game-show-answer formula. The first scene shows Jamal being
tortured by police who suspect him of cheating, unable to believe that a
“slumdog” orphan could know the answers to all those trivia questions. Jamal
insists he really did know the answers, and the suddenly sympathetic cops
disconnect the electrodes from his toes and decide to let him explain further
as they watch a tape of the show. The one-two punch of crazy slum story
providing an unlikely memory that later serves as a trivia answer becomes
apparent very quickly, and never deviates through the entire film. This
structure might have worked, but here it feels contrived and repetitive. The
pace of the film is frantic, some of the flashbacks have comic merit, but by
the third or fourth musical montage, it all feels too hectic and sloppy,
especially considering the rigid and somewhat boring structure upon which the
film is built.
People have been praising the performances in the film, and with the exception
of the child actors and Bollywood veteran Anil Kapoor, I’m bewildered by this.
Dev Patel’s Jamal is passable at best. He’s sympathetic, but most of the film
he looks plainly dumbfounded at his own impossible luck. He gives us no real
reason to care for him other than the fact that he’s a basically good person,
and he’s in love.
The love story, seen by many to be central to the film, is sorely lacking.
Jamal and Latika meet because they are both orphans, she’s first allowed to run
with Jamal and Samir out of pity. The brothers loose track of Latika, only to
later rescue her from forced prostitution. The would-be lovers are again pulled
apart when Samir, who has turned to a life of crime, forces her to become a
part of his crime lord’s harem. Jamal’s impetus for being on the game show, and
his motivation to continue his stellar run, turns out to not be about money at
all, but rather to get on TV in hopes that Latika, where ever she is, will see
him. Sure enough, she does, and with the help of an inexplicably reformed
Samir, she escapes the harem to find Jamal, her one true love. It’s the kind of
shallow love story that plagues many Hollywood films.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a “love conquers all” philosophy
propping up a film, but the whole thing collapses if that love doesn’t feel
genuine. Freida Pinto as Latika, like Patel’s performance, is so-so at best.
The film is too crowded and busy to allow any chemistry to build between these
two. Sure, they’ve helped each other out of crazy situations, but just because
a fireman saved my life doesn’t mean I’d want to marry him. When Jamal
emphatically claims that being with Latika is their “destiny,” we’re forced to
take his word for it.
Some will say that many of my issues with the film are due to the fact that I’m
not seeing it as Boyle’s homage to Bollywood. While it’s true that the film is
deeply indebted to the colorful and melodramatic musicals that are a mainstay
of Indian culture, I don’t think the film holds up even under this reading. The
key problem goes back to the lead actors’ performances. Great Bollywood players
are not naturalistic by any means, they are exaggerated, playful, and
incredibly charismatic. It seems like Boyle couldn’t decide which way he wanted
Patel and Pinto to play it. Should they be overly theatrical to match the color
and up-tempo editing? Or should they play it more realistically, two normal
people brought together by extraordinary circumstances? In the end they do
neither.
Slumdog Millionaire is not without merit. It’s nothing if not an ambitious
film, and certain scenes do work well. But ultimately it’s an annoying
cacophony atop a predictable structure.
http://blog.spout.com/2008/09/02/slumdog-millionaire-review-telluride-2008/
