Slumdog Millionaire: Memories Of Mumbai Chris Knight, National Post Published: Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Fox SearchlightDev Patel, left, and Freida Pinto in a scene from the Fox Searchlight film "Slumdog Millionaire." FILM REVIEW Slumdog Millionaire When Danny Boyle's name gets mentioned, most people recall that he directed the gritty zombie movie 28 Days Later and the grimy Trainspotting, Scotland's answer to Pulp Fiction. Less remembered is the 2004 family charmer Millions, about two Liverpool lads who find a bag holding a quarter of a million pounds sterling. Boyle now brings together these two moods in Slumdog Millionaire, in which an impoverished Indian teenager from the wrong side of the tracks (and my but that country has a lot of tracks) stands to win 20 million rupees on the local version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. As the movie opens, Jamal (London-born Dev Patel) is getting a brutal once-over from the police, who are convinced he somehow cheated his way to being one question away from the show's top prize. (Twenty million rupees at today's rates is about a half a million dollars but no doubt goes a lot further on the subcontinent.) At first neither we nor the police inspector (Irfan Khan) are sure if he's interrogating an idiot savant or Keyser Soze. But the inspector grows increasingly sympathetic as he questions the boy about each answer he was able to produce, and the film flips into flashback, showing young Jamal and his brother, Salim, growing up on the mean streets of Mumbai. Their tragic youth gives new meaning to the term "school of hard knocks." Jamal remembers the name of a famous Indian film star because he once had to plunge into a cesspit in order to obtain the man's autograph -- which his brother, in what will soon become a pattern of unbrotherly behaviour, then sold. The boys' mother was killed in an anti-Muslim riot that also managed to imprint on young Jamal an image of the Hindu god Rama, which gives him the answer to another question. And so it goes. Neurologists tell us that memory is divided into the semantic (acquired facts and information) and the episodic (a chronological remembrance of experiences) but in Jamal's case the two are united. Every time fate knocks him down, it leaves him a paisa of knowledge that will one day yield riches in compound interest. Technically, this use of destiny (and of the repeated phrase "it is written") pushes the film into the realm of magic realism, but Boyle keeps us firmly in touch with the real. "Bizarrely plausible" is how the cop sums it up at one point. As the two brothers grow up, they befriend a third musketeer, a little girl named Lakita, who intermittently disappears from Jamal's life but never from his thoughts. Meanwhile, his street smarts continue to grow in dramatic fashion. For example, he learns who invented the revolver when someone waves one of the gunmaker's more recent models in his face. Jamal and Salim eke out an existence on the edge of India's criminal underworld. Particularly nice is a scene of the two conversing in a restaurant kitchen where they've briefly found work; as Salim talks, he absentmindedly selects an empty water bottle from the trash can, fills it from the tap and then uses glue to fake one of those do-not-use-if-tampered-with seals. It's hard to think of them as evil, however; they're just scarred by circumstance. Jamal in particular remains a dreamer and a sympathetic anti-hero. The movie runs a solid two hours, but Boyle expertly handles the pacing. He moves confidently from flashbacks to the present-day set of the quiz show, whose host is so affronted at the thought of someone winning the grand prize that I briefly mistook it for an Indian version of Win Ben Stein's Money. In fact, the Millionaire set is identical to the one occupied by Regis Philbin at the turn of the century, which gives the film a nice near-retro feel. Of course, you have to root for the plucky underdog in his bid to go from (as the Millionaire host puts it) rags to raja. After all, he seems to have been born to play this game; it's as if life gave him lemons and he patented Snapple. Slumdog Millionaire had its Canadian debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, where it walked away with the People's Choice Award. And yes, that was the audience's final answer. http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/movies/story.html?id=953045
