Review: Crowd-pleasing 'Slumdog" with truth and beauty By Glenn Whipp MediaNews staff Article Last Updated: 11/11/2008 12:17:31 PM PST
http://www.insidebayarea.com/entertainment/ci_10956389 Click photo to enlarge Dev Patel and Freida Pinto star in "Slumdog Millionaire." * « * 1 * » Movie showtimes Bursting with energy, color and a bracing humanism, Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire" is an underdog story that you can feel plenty good about liking. Boyle and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy ("The Full Monty") deftly combine Dickens and Bollywood, kinetic camerawork and a seamless story that celebrates the vagaries of fate. "Slumdog" has earned ovations at film festivals and, even for the hardest cynic, it's guaranteed to raise at least a smile. Boyle, adding another entry to an already impressively eclectic resume ("Trainspotting," "28 Days Later," "Sunshine," "Shallow Grave"), establishes his rock-'em, sock-'em aesthetic from the outset, juxtaposing images of teenage Jamal (Dev Patel) walking onto the shiny set of India's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" with shots of him being brutally interrogated by local police. What happened? Jamal, an uneducated street kid, is but one question away from winning the show's grand prize of 20 million rupees. His success seems so preposterous — how could he possibly know whose face is on an American $100 bill? — that authorities suspect he is cheating. But as we come to learn through an interrogation with a police detective (Irfan Khan), Jamal has earned his trivial knowledge the hard way. Via flashbacks, we see the young Jamal and his tough brother Salim growing up on the streets of Mumbai, eking out a living through the virtue of their wits, and meeting a beautiful young orphan, ________________________________ Advertisement ________________________________ Latika, who will become the love of cockeyed optimist Jamal's life. "Slumdog" achieves a startling power as it moves between Jamal sitting on "Millionaire's" shiny altar of consumerism and the abject poverty of Mumbai. Boyle has never been a sentimentalist, and he captures the vibrant energy and soulful spirit of the film's squalid setting without sugarcoating its disturbing dangers. Any movie that contains hate-induced riots, orphans being brutally blinded, pimps, prostitutes and a kid diving into a pond of poop so he can obtain his favorite star's autograph can't really be accused of pandering, can it? If anything, the film's idea that firsthand knowledge trumps book learning seems positively perverse in an age where people have the means to live at a complete remove from the world. "Slumdog" is a fairy tale writ large, for sure, but there's truth and beauty to the movie's central notion that the meek will inherit the earth, even if they have to go through hell before claiming the prize. 'Slumdog Millionaire' a- * STARRING: Dev Patel, Irfan Khan * DIRECTOR: Danny Boyle * WHERE: At the Embarcadero, S.F.; Kabuki, S.F. * RATING: R for some violence, disturbing images, language * RUNNING TIME: 2 hours
