‘Slumdog Millionaire’: Mumbai melodrama Swirling with color, jumping with energy, awash in melodrama, Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire” is the crowd-pleaser that won the audience award at this year’s Toronto Film Festival. That it seems both conventional and familiar doesn’t diminish its enjoyability factor. It’s not exactly shameless; rather, it’s eager and effervescent, too caught up in its own excitement to worry about the niceties. Perhaps it’s the setting of the Mumbai slums or the casual interplay between average citizens and ruthless mobsters, but the script by Simon Beaufoy has a whiff of Gregory David Roberts’ epic Mumbai novel, “Shantaram.” Still, Roberts never had his characters interact with the East Indian version of Regis Philbin. That’s where we first find Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), the hero of the film. Well, more accurately, he’s initially seen in a police station, getting the crap slapped out of him. But in Boyle’s jumpy timeline, it’s all part of the bigger picture: Here’s Jamal, a slumdog native of the worst parts of Mumbai, one question away from winning the big jackpot on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” on Indian TV – and it’s such an unlikely prospect that the show’s host (Anil Kapoor) assumes Jamal must be cheating. So he sics the cops on him to beat the truth from Jamal. And, in telling the chief inspector (Irfan Khan of “The Namesake” and “A Mighty Heart”) his picaresque tale of survival in the slums, Jamal reveals himself to be an autodidactic Oliver Twist, in but not of the criminal life in the way that his older brother, Salim (Madhur Mittal), is. And, of course, there’s a girl: Latika (Freida Pinto), who Jamal met as a child and for whom he’s carried a torch ever since. But each time their paths cross, some barrier keeps her from running away with him – until, well, you can figure it out. Boyle is a visual stylist who understands how to inject energy into already energetic moments – and he isn’t afraid to play up pathos when the opportunity presents itself. This is soap-operatically Bollywood stuff, played against a backdrop of crushing poverty and the contrast of the massive wealth of the quiz show and what it promises. Patel is a sweet-faced young actor with the chops to pull you into this world, to make you care about Jamal and believe in his sense of morality. Pinto has the right edge of tragedy to her – that sense of a beautiful woman who understands that trading on her looks may be her only ticket to self-preservation, no matter how unsavory the trade-off. Can “Slumdog Millionaire” cross over to a mainstream audience – and even live up to the overheated Oscar buzz that seems to be swirling around it? It’s certainly got a scrappy underdog quality to it, but it may just have to settle for being a neatly appointed little package of movie entertainment.
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