Out of Frame: Slumdog Millionaire Ever wonder how much luck is involved in the success of the average quiz show winner? Sure, being a brainiac doesn't hurt, but no matter how much you know, unless the Venn diagram of your knowledge and those questions has significant overlap, you're done and luck trumps preparation. If Ken Jennings' first Jeopardy! appearance had the set of questions from the day on which he eventually lost, instead of being the most famous game show contestant in history, he might just be some nerdy computer programmer from Utah you never heard of. But what if you got on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, and every question you got, by pure coincidence, had a tie-in to a specific event in your life, fate putting the fix in so that you were only asked questions your life had been preparing you to answer? If you're a poor 18-year-old kid from the Muslim slums of Mumbai who grew up as an orphan and a grifter, it means you get to your final, 20 million rupee question and are hauled off by the cops on suspicion of fraud. That's where Jamal, the titular "slumdog" finds himself at the opening of Slumdog Millionaire, being tortured mercilessly by two unsavory lawmen attempting to get him to fess up to just how he got to the final question on the notoriously difficult Indian version of the famous game show. Once they quit slapping him around, Jamal begins to tell his story, which unfolds in two interlocking sets of flashbacks: one to his life growing up with his ne'er-do-well brother after the death of his mother, the other to his nerve-wracking run on the previous night's taping of the show. As the cops go over the tape with him question by question, Jamal tells stories from his past that explain exactly how he knew the answers. And if that's all the movie was, it would be a pretty tedious and predictable affair, but screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) takes considerable liberties with the novel on which the film is based. These two sets of flashbacks aren't the whole story at all. Both lead to a cleverly constructed convergence around the great unrequited love of Jamal's life, a girl (Latika) he meets while he's still a young boy. They're both street urchins scamming money for a Fagin-like boss who uses the kids ruthlessly. Director Danny Boyle has made a career out of a deficit of attention towards any particular genre. He's done the Hitchcockian thriller, the Scottish heroin movie, the fantastical American road romance, the low-fi zombie flick, and contemplative sci-fi. Finding him in India doing a bilingual feature with Bollywood actors and unknowns might seem surprising, but when it comes to Boyle, there's nothing "typical" to begin with. No two films could possibly look more different than the crisp, glossy, ultra-modern and interstellar palette of his last film, Sunshine, and the dirty poverty and visual chaos contained in Slumdog Millionaire's grainy cinematography. But what really typifies his work is a good story, well told, and that's exactly what Slumdog Millionaire has. Boyle doesn't try to fight his fish-out-of-water status as an English filmmaker working in Mumbai. Culturally, the film is unmistakeably Western - that it centers on the Indian version of a popular Western game show gives it an instantly recognizable reference point. Organized crime archetypes are also familiar, and Boyle pushes the religious and class distinctions that underlie the story into subtle background notes; they're vital, yet secondary to the story Boyle wants to tell. He even throws in American and British tourists for more familiar touches (hough interestingly, by the time they come up, we're so immersed in the lives of Jamal, his brother Salim, and Latika, that rather than becoming proxies for the audience in a strange land, they're quite obviously outsiders in a world and to characters with which we now identify). And Boyle embraces the Bollywood side of things as well, and those touches (many undoubtedly courtesy Indian director Loveleen Tandan, to whom Boyle gave a co-director credit as a result of her input), are great fun and make for a rich and diverse film. Most of all, though, Slumdog Millionaire is hugely entertaining. That it's completely implausible isn't a hindrance at all. Like a director from Hollywood's golden age, Boyle has a particular talent for putting a realistic spin on the outlandish. His cast is pitch perfect, from Bollywood star Anil Kapoor as the nearly reptilian game show host, to British newcomer Dev Patel as Jamal. Boyle also enlists legendary Indian film composer A.R. Rahman to put together a stellar soundtrack (including a great collaboration between Rahman and M.I.A.). Though it has its heavier moments, it's one of the most guiltlessly pleasurable films to be released this year: smart, funny, fast-paced, and poignant.
http://dcist.com/2008/11/12/out_of_frame_slumdog_millionaire.php
