>From 'Slumdog' to Riches In a Crowd-Pleasing Fable
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Jamal (Dev Patel, left, with Anil Kapoor) scores big in "Slumdog." (By Ishika
Mohan -- Fox Searchlight Pictures)
The life story of Jamal (Dev Patel, with Freida
Pinto) unfurls in Dickensian fashion in director Danny Boyle's fanciful
take on modern-day India. (By Ishika Mohan -- Fox Searchlight Pictures)
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Who's Blogging
» Links to this article By Ann Hornaday
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 12, 2008;
Page C01
Imagine the young David Copperfield transported in time and place to
the dizzying, impoverished, improbably beguiling city of Mumbai and you
get the gist of "Slumdog Millionaire."
This Story
* Movies: From 'Slumdog' to Riches In a Crowd-Pleasing Fable
* Fall Movie Guide
This modern-day "rags-to-rajah" fable won the audience award at the Toronto
International Film Festival earlier this year, and it's easy to see why. With
its timely setting of
a swiftly globalizing India and, more specifically, the country's own
version of the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire"
TV show, combined with timeless melodrama and a hardworking orphan who
withstands all manner of setbacks, "Slumdog Millionaire" plays like Charles
Dickens for the 21st century. But in this particular saga, the stench and soot
of Victorian England have been replaced by the Tata fumes and
computer-screen glow that envelop a country in the throes of profound
economic and cultural change.
The resourceful, unerringly grounded title character is one Jamal
Malik (Dev Patel), a lanky, lantern-jawed kid from the slums of Mumbai
(formerly called Bombay) whom we meet just after he has won 10 million
rupees on the game show. As the movie asks in a set of cleverly
designed titles, how could a young man with no formal education know so
many answers to such arcane questions? Accused of cheating, Jamal is
taken into custody by the Mumbai police, and he proceeds to tell them
his story, a tale of one boy's decidedly unsentimental education by way
of poverty, tribal strife, abandonment, exploitation, criminal gangs
and -- this is a crowd-pleaser, after all -- undying love.
Like such other Western filmmakers as Wes Anderson and Chris Smith, director
Danny Boyle has clearly found inspiration in the landscape and textures of
modern-day India, whose historic aesthetic of riotous color and lush
extravagance coexists with otherwise blah call centers and
vanilla-colored condos.
In fact, without such a dynamic and visually arresting backdrop,
"Slumdog Millionaire," which was adapted by screenwriter Simon Beaufoy
from a novel by Vikas Swarup, would be just another by-the-numbers
melodrama. Even as a besieged underdog, Patel often makes a maddeningly
laconic protagonist. Indeed, the two most interesting characters are
the film's only ambiguous ones: Jamal's brother, Salim (Madhur Mittal),
whose motives are as opaque as they are mercurial, and game show host
Prem Kumar, played by Anil Kapoor with the sly poker face of a
professional knife-fighter. (The film is worth the price of admission
just to hear Kapoor's silky pronunciation of the word "millionaire.")
With its stock characters and often outlandishly contrived plot,
"Slumdog Millionaire" could easily be relegated to the category of
cinematic stunt, a penny dreadful for the postmodern age. But even at
its most superficial and floridly overheated, this chai-fueled tall
tale retains its appeal, largely because of Boyle's fluency with the
medium he so obviously loves. Viewers familiar with such earlier films
as "Trainspotting" and "28 Days Later" know of Boyle's love for snazzy
cuts and stylized effects. Those predilections serve him well in a
story that needs to move with the lightning speed of the society it
reflects. Even when "Slumdog Millionaire" is retailing the most
appalling depredations of Jamal's life (a disgusting episode at a
public toilet, unspeakable violence at the hands of a Fagin-like
kidnapper), Boyle manages to capture the pulse and verve of a universe
where anything is possible.
That admittedly sounds like a fairy tale, and
thinking of it as such is the best way to encounter "Slumdog
Millionaire." (If the audience doubts the film's underlying sense of
fantasy, it should stick around for the rousing closing-credits
sequence.) And like all good fairy tales, this outsize celebration of
perseverance and moral triumph contains within it a deeper idea -- in
this case, the relative nature of what we think we know, and what's
worth knowing at all. No doubt Dickens himself would approve.
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