Slumdog Millionaire
Directed by Danny Boyle
By Jesse Hassenger
Reading a description ofSlumdog Millionaire — it's about a kid from the slums
of India who gets on his country's version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?—
you'd be forgiven for assuming it's based (however loosely) on some
kind of wonky true story. But Simon Beaufoy's script comes from a
novel, not a memoir, which accounts for the neat structure: as Jamal
(Dev Patel) is questioned under suspicion of game-show cheating, he
explains how his life experiences informed his correct answers.
What keeps this from melting into a lukewarm Britcom puddle is one
Danny Boyle. Boyle is one of those directors who, to some eyes, may
never live down a breakthrough: in this case, his electric version of
Irivine Welsh's druggie novel Trainspotting. He came to America for A Life Less
Ordinary and scored a post-Titanic DiCaprio for The Beach,
but both films were critical and financial disappointments, and he
retreated back to Britain. The trip reinvigorated him; he now sprints
from horror to family to sci-fi like characters from his films, who
inevitably find themselves running through the streets or,
occasionally, spaceship corridors.
Now we have Boyle's feel-good underdog story, and it pulses with real
energy and grit; Jamal (seen as a little kid, a pubescent, and finally
a young man) isn't a tireless, remarkable striver fated for
bootstraps-pulling greatness so much as an industrious, good-hearted
kid with luck equal parts great and terrible. While Jamal wants to
protect his friend Latika (played as a young woman by Freida Pinto),
his brother Salim discovers the power of violence — and money.
That thrall courses through every level of society Jamal encounters,
from the slums up to the rich, development-happy real estate gangsters.
Boyle is attuned to these unstoppable developments, and shoots Mumbai
with a breakneck vibrancy recalling City of God;
he's one of the few directors who absorbs the influence of music videos
into a fluid narrative (it doesn't hurt that he's got great taste in
soundtracks, too). Slumdog Millionaire is dazzling entertainment.
If it's only that, and not quite up to the director's absolute best,
it's because Jamal and Latika have the simplistic relationship of a
silent movie couple — sweet, earnest, torn apart by fate — and not the
messy chemistry of true love. Boyle's films aren't typically about
rich, multifaceted characters; he tends to identify with quickly
sketched young scramblers, struggling through dire or fantastic
circumstances. But Latika's fairy-tale vagueness makes the love story
more nice than passionate (the young lovers in A Life Less Ordinary may have
been romantic-comedy constructs, but at least their onscreen
conversations were frequent, and usually over thirty seconds long).
Boyle can make up for this by promising to make his next picture a
musical; the beats, color, and credits sequence of Slumdog Millionaire all beg
for it.
http://thelmagazine.com/6/32/Film/film3.cfm?ctype=2
