Slumdog Millionaire
April 01, 2009
By Koehler, Robert
Slumdog Millionaire Produced by Christian Colson; directed by Danny Boyle;
co-directed (India) by Loveleen Tandan; screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, based
on the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup; cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle;
production design by Mark Digby; costumes by Suttirat Anne Larlarb; edited
by Chris Dickens; music by A.R. Rahman; starring Dev Patel, Frieda Pinto,
Madhur Mittal, Anil Kapoor, Irrfan Khan CQ, Tanay Hemant Chheda CQ, Tanvi
Ganesh Lonkar, Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala. 116 mins. A Fox Searchlight release.
Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire is the film of the moment for the "new
middlebrow"- that audience able to perceive momentous changes in the world
and culture when they're reported in, say, The New York Times, but one, at
the same time, that wouldn't have the slightest clue that the most thrilling
new rushes of creative filmmaking since the nouvelle vague originate in the
apartments and editing rooms of Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Barcelona, and Buenos
Aires. This new middlebrow has a fresh object of adoration in Boyle's
entertainment, since it quite conveniently summarizes and expresses so many
wishes, hopes, and romantic yearnings of the West toward what is perceived
as the troubled East- with today's West resembling nothing so much as the
West of the Sixties and its taste for turning Indian style into various
forms of Hippie Chic. (Slumdog is paisley cinema, pure and simple.) Boyle's
feverish, woozy, drunken, and thoroughly contrived picaresque also
conveniently packages misperceptions about India (and the East) that
continue to support the dominant Western view of the Subcontinent, making
the film a potent object to examine not only what is cockeyed about an
outsider's view (particularly, an Englishman's view) of India, but even
more, what is misperceived by a middlebrow critical establishment and
audience about what comprises world cinema.
Suitably then, the creative godfather of Slumdog, more than Bollywood
musical fantasies, is Charles Dickens. Certain Bollywood tropes are
obediently followed, such as the innocent hero rising above terrible
circumstances, the determined pursuit of a love against all odds and that
stock Bollywood type, the snarling (often mustachioed) nemesis. But,
including the much discussed group-dance finale, these are tropes included
almost by necessity and play onscreen in a notably rote fashion. They are
alien to Boyle, which is why the Dickens model is more culturally and even
cinematically germane when addressing the issues inside Slumdog. Dickens's
picaresque novels about young underdog heroes struggling and managing to
eventually thrive in social settings weighed heavily against them were grist
for, first, Vikas Swarup's novel, Q & A, and then, Simon Beaufoy's loosely
adapted screenplay, which greatly compresses the novel's episodes and
sections, renames characters and- for as outlandish as the final film is-
actually tones down the adventure's more incredible events and coincidences.
If Dickens's milieu was the early years of the Industrial Revolution, the
film's setting is the new era of globalism, in which India is undergoing its
own revolution. Jamal (Dev Patel) is Pip, Nicholas Nickleby, and Oliver
Twist rolled into one, a lad who by sheer gumption has managed to land a
spot as a contestant on the hugely popular Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
even though he's a humble (but oh so smart) chai wallah (or tea servant) at
a cell- phone sales center. When he's first seen on screen, though, Jamal is
in trouble: A fat cop is abusing him in a police station, though that's
nothing next to the electrocution he receives from the chief inspector
(veteran Indian actor Irrfan Khan), who's convinced that Jamal has cheated
on the show. How, his caste- based logic goes, could a "slumdog" like Jamal
have won ten million rupees (and only one question away from winning 100
million) without cheating? Even the most scurrilous and bigoted of Mumbai
cops likely wouldn't go all Abu Ghraib on a poor teen boy for cheating on
TV, and it's just the start of the film's endless supply of stunning
exaggeration-for- effect gambits that are more like a two-by-four upside the
head than anything that might be termed in polite company as "dramatic
touches." Boyle appears to have absorbed this exaggeration into his
directorial bloodstream, since, in at least the film's first half and
lingering long into the second, he indulges in a rush of shots filmed with
an obsessively canted camera, the technique lovingly nurtured by Orson
Welles to convey states of eruption and dislocation, but grievously abused
by Boyle through repetitive excess until it reeks of desperation.
So, we get it: Jamal has everything stacked against him as he must convince
these thugs with badges how he knew the questions thrown to him by the
show's supercilious and remarkably condescending host, Prem (Anil Kapoor),
and that he will-it is written-prevail. From here, the rest of the movie
comprises Jamal's case, which begins with the wildly implausible notion that
Jamal remembers more or less everything in his life inside the framework of
a Dickens novel, and ends with his endless and, um, dogged pursuit of his
only true love, the beautiful (can she be anything else?) Latika (Frieda
Pinto). Of course, wild implausibility has been Boyle's general
stock-in-trade for some time, beginning with his Clockwork Orange pastiche,
Trainspotting (which followed his Hammer pastiche, Shallow Grave, and
preceded his Roland Emmerich pastiche, The Beach, a film so awful that it
would have killed many lesser mortals' directing careers on the spot, and
nearly killed Boyle's). 28 Days Later was intrinsically implausible-about
zombies apparently ready to race Usain Bolt in the Olympics-but so burly,
aggressive, and spectacularly rude that it didn't allow a moment's pause for
reflection. Is Boyle's last movie, Sunshine, about a space crew on a mission
straight for the sun, any more ridiculous than Slumdog Millionaire, which
suggests that a little Muslim boy raised in Mumbai's worst hellholes can
become rich and famous? (Well, maybe a little more.)
Because Slumdog isn't conceived as a genre piece with its own built-in
conventions (horror, sci-fi) but is rather a self- consciously contrived
picaresque situated in the real world of Indian class structure, Muslim/
Hindu religious conflicts, underworld crime rings, and pop media, the sheer
impulse to push the story into a frothy romance functions as a betrayal of
its fundamental material. In the end, when Jamal has won (because, as the
viewer is reminded more times than is worth counting, his victory is
destined to happen), he becomes India's new superstar, its latest populist
hero, a seeming sensation, a bolt out of the blue. So where is he? Squatting
ever so quietly, alone, unmolested, unnoticed by anyone in Mumbai's central
train station, where he spots Latika, also alone, and where they then run to
each other and break into a Bollywoodstyle number. The effect of this scene
turned the first audience at Telluride, based on eyewitness accounts, all
goofy in the head. ("I wanted to run outside and scream and holler at the
mountains," one starry-eyed survivor told me.)
It's hard to argue against such sentiment or reaction; for sure, early
viewers of Julie Andrews running down that Austrian meadow in The Sound of
Music were similarly nutty. Some are just mad for Slumdog Millionaire-
including far, far too many critics- and they won't hear a discouraging
word. As the cultlike object of many in the new middlebrow, no argument is
heard, and some express outright shock when their beloved new movie is
broken apart, knocked, or outright dismissed as what it is-a really, really
minor movie, with really, really big problems. Just as the score by composer
A.R. Rahman, a crafty and fairly cynical Bollywood hand, is bogus "Indian"
music from top to bottom, with an excess of quasi-hiphop stylings,
electronic beat patterns and vocalese gumming up the works and sounding like
the kind of backgrounds one might hear in a TV travel advert, so the closing
number is bogus Bollywood following on the heels of bogus social drama.
The problem, for the fresh-scrubbed middlebrow and for the rest of us, is
that if the real thing isn't known-that is, genuinely Indian cinema-how to
judge the Fox Searchlight facsimile?
Really, though, Slumdog is fun, so let your quibbles just drift away, sit
back, relax and let it spill all over you like a nice mango lassi. That's
certainly the refrain of too many of the post- Telluride reviews, which
recognized Boyle's brazen manipulations and absurd storytelling jumps of
even marginal logic for what they were but still joined in the cheering (a
word that I counted in at least ten reviews). And they're right; it is
fun-fun as a cultural fabrication to question. Consider this overlooked yet
central aspect of the film's many conceits: Slumdog uses TV as a national
arena, and precisely as the medium wherein Jamal not only escapes his class,
but (when the show is reviewed on tape during the police station
interrogation) uses it as a tool to justify his existence. The film at once
reinforces the myths of reality game show TV as actual rather than
manufactured suspense and as a machine for getting rich quick, while-in
total contradiction- suggests that TV can also be a partner with the police
in torture. As at so many other points, Boyle and Beaufoy try to have it
both ways: Jamal proves his mettle by deploying his life experiences in
order to be the ideal game show star, while the show itself (via Prem, who
says that he "owns" the show and reveals that he's also from the slums)
collaborates with police to persecute and torture Jamal, even though Prem
also knows-an important point-that Jamal isn't cheating. The basis for
arranging for Jamal's arrest is a collapsing house of cards on close
inspection, since the arrest is not only a surprise to the show's producer,
but couldn't have possibly been managed by Prem, who has after all been on
the show during airtime. Perhaps Prem is jealous of his fellow slumdog? An
interesting, even profound, character point-one that's right there, hanging
like ripe narrative fruit, and which would have been even more interesting
had Beaufoy and Boyle bothered to pluck it. The Dickensian sensibility, with
its ironies and coincidences, is imposed here but never truly developed and
only selectively applied-Dickens's picaresque tales, laden with social
criticism and narrative athleticism, never fail to point a harsh finger at
unjust authority (something Boyle is clearly uncomfortable doing) through a
romance of the hero's ultimately improbable triumph over odds (something
Boyle bases his whole movie on, culminating with the ersatz Bollywood
finale). As a result, the exchanges of colonialism in Slumdog Millionaire
are too delicious not to notice. In a single film, we have: the celebration
of the export of a British gameshow to the Indian viewing public; a
narrative structured on the show itself and the (British) Dickens
picaresque; a disastrously tone-deaf and colorblind depiction of the world
experienced by Muslim lower classes as decorated in gloriously erotic and
lush colors as perhaps only a European-based director (Boyle) and
cinematographer (the usually brilliant and ingenious Anthony Dod Mantle)
could manage; a British-themed call center as the opening of opportunity and
upward mobility for Jamal.
In its expressly liberal intentions to depict an India in which a single
Muslim boy can win a nation's heart, Slumdog Millionaire massages the
Western viewer's gaze on a country and culture they barely know, save for a
vague sense of cultural exports like the occasional Bollywood movie or song.
Perhaps especially now, after the fearsome attacks by Islamist extremists on
Mumbai's most cherished institutions and on Western tourists, Boyle's film
is just the soft pillow for concerned Western viewers to plump their heads;
surely, there's hope, when even a Muslim lad who is abused, scorned, and
rejected can recover his dignity, win the girl and thrive in a world free of
terror. It's precisely the India of which Westerners, starting with its
former British masters, heartily dream, an India where everything is
possible.
The Indian reality, of course, is far more complex, and it has taken
filmmakers of sublime artistry and a subtle grasp of the huge Indian
spectrum like Mani Ratnam, Shonali Bose, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Girish
Kasaravalli, and Murali Nair to express that complexity on screen.
Opportunities for lower classes to free themselves from the old constraints
are indeed greater now in India than ever before, largely through the jobs
created by the nation's exploding hightech and manufacturing sectors, which
have literally created a middle class where one barely existed before. That
new middle class is full of Jamals, using the new social streams fostered by
computers and the Web to find types of work that simply never existed before
in the Indian economy. The now infamous call centers-an aspect Boyle's film
hardly glances at-are mere slivers of this new economy. But it is new, and
therefore has only just begun to make its presence felt in a nation of such
vast stretches and distances of geography, culture, religious traditions,
and economic status.
It's here that Boyle's vision of India goes truly south, since it reinforces
his target audience's general ignorance of reference points in Indian
cinema. An affectionate nod in an early sequence to the Bollywood spectacles
starring Amitabh Bachchan is typical: His enduring superstar status aside,
the particular Amitabh movies visually cited in Slumdog Millionaire are
actually too old for Jamal- a lower-class boy born in the late Eighties-to
have seen (except, perhaps, on videotape). The brief Amitabh film reel in
Slumdog is more properly seen as reflective of Boyle's own personal memory
bank of the Bollywood movies seen in his youth, and therefore useful for
Boyle's purposes, since Amitabh remains the one Bollywood superstar widely
known in the West. (He's also something of an insider's joke here, since he
was the original host of the Indian Millionaire show titled, Kaun Banega
Crorepati? (Who Will Become a Crorepati?).
Slumdog Millionaire may be minor, but in one way it's important: It serves
as the ideal vehicle for the new middlebrow's perception of what makes up
world cinema. For starters, as a non-Indian movie with Indian actors (pros
based in the U.K. and India, plus newcomers and nonpros), dialog, settings
and music, it provides a comfortable substitute for a genuine Indian film
(say, by the above-mentioned, neglected and under-seen Ratnam, Dasgupta, or
Nair). The new middlebrow can thus say they've covered their current Indian
cinema; after all, they've seen-and enjoyed-Slumdog Millionaire.
Boyle's film has been celebrated as an expression of globalization, and it's
certainly true that the story itself couldn't exist in a world before
globalization took effect in once- protectionist India, and that Jamal's
progress is globalization incarnate. But a truer manifestation of
globalization is the explosion of world cinema itself, and how the past
decade and a half has seen the spread of national cinemas to an unmatched
degree in the art form's history. This has been possible only through the
combined forces of globalization and the absorption of previous
experimentation in film grammar and theory; the ways in which local
filmmakers in their local conditions have responded to the challenges of
making cinema on their own terms has made the current period probably the
most exciting ever from a global perspective.
India is an interesting example in this regard, since its many languages and
regions have produced a wide range of filmmaking styles and voices, most of
which continue to struggle (like Ratnam, who himself dances between more
genres and forms than Steven Soderbergh) to be seen abroad. We're living in
the midst of a paradoxical climate, however: Just as world cinema and its
locally- based voices (and not glib fly-bynight tourists like Boyle) are
more aggressively active than ever, and more exciting in their expressions,
the outlets in the U.S. for this work are shrinking. Distributors, burned by
too many subtitled films that bomb at the box office, have narrowed their
shopping lists at festivals and markets. Alternative outlets, from festivals
to payper- view, can contain only so many titles. Video is the last refuge,
meaning that cinema made by artists ends up being seen (if at all) on TV.
Boyle is obviously keenly aware of this condition in his own film about
characters raised speaking Hindu: He manages to compress the Hindu dialogue
into about fifteen minutes' total running time (a fraction of the full
running time of 116 minutes), and then offer up subtitles for the Hindu in
distractingly snazzy lines of text that dance all over the screen like a
hyperkinetic TV ad- apparently the perfect solution for otherwise worldly
minded folks who hate reading subtitles. In the future, Slumdog Millionaire
might be seen as a talisman of a potentially degraded film culture, in which
audiences were sufficiently dumbed-down to accept the fake rather than the
real thing, and in a new middlebrow haze, weren't able to perceive the
difference.-Robert Koehler
Copyright Cineaste Spring 2009
http://www.californiachronicle.com/articles/yb/128346053
--
regards,
Vithur
