CHANCE OF A LIFETIME

Director Danny Boyle gives his protagonist a chance of a lifetime in Slumdog Millionaire/ by Francisco Lo

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Everyone loves a good underdog story. Growing up in the harrowing slums of Mumbai as a panhandling orphan, Jamal Malik is perhaps one of the most improbable success stories. Now he is on India’s most popular television show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? and is one question away from winning the top prize of 20 million rupees. So begins Danny Boyle’s enticing Slumdog Millionaire.

Hold on a second. That is not exactly how the story begins. In the first frame of the film, you’ll see Jamal tied up and tortured by interrogating police officers because he is suspected of cheating. The cops have a point. Lawyers and doctors can barely get beyond half the questions on the show, so how could an uneducated slumdog like Jamal possibly possesses that much knowledge? It all sounds like a pretty simple and wishful story, but Slumdog Millionaire cleverly unfolds the history and mystery of Jamal Malik with each question from his run on the game show. Adapted from Vikas Swarup’s book Q & A by screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, Jamal’s story is told in a series of flashbacks and flashforwards. In between the scenes of police interrogation and Jamal’s childhood, the audience is also treated to nail-biting scenes between Jamal and the tongue-in-cheek game show host Prem (played by Bollywood star Anil Kapoor). The flow of the film is unconventional, yet with the game show as the center of the spin, the story is surprisingly easy to follow.

The high-energy sequences shot in the slums of Mumbai will remind viewers of Fernando Meirelles’s City of God, but Boyle’s film has a much softer rhetoric in comparison. To be fair, Slumdog Millionaire never sets out to be a social realist drama with its fairytale-like storyline of a peasant on the verge of being a millionaire. The film is confidently idealistic, but Danny Boyle’s subtle social commentary is no less powerful. From the fake bottled water filled by Jamal’s brother Salim for a touristy restaurant to the boys’ phony tours at Taj Mahal, the film takes a witty jab at cultural colonialism, not to mention that the popular television game show is also a Western creation. Well-intentioned Westerners pay young Jamal a hundred dollars for a tour in the slums, despite the fact that their Mercedes rental is completely ransacked by Jamal’s fellow street urchins. As an outsider from another country, Boyle sensibly avoids any heavy-handed moral lessons, the kind of white privilege so prevalent in a world where Angelina Jolie saves the Third World one child at a time.

The rags-to-riches story of an underdog trying to save the love of his life from a horrid gangster looks bland and conventional on paper, but Slumdog Millionaire is far from your ordinary picture. With the captivating cinematography, by Dogma 95 veteran Anthony Dod Mantle, and a chest-pounding soundtrack, Danny Boyle keeps his viewers wanting to know more about Jamal’s compelling story in spite of the unbelievable coincidences. Jamal’s single-minded pursuit of saving his beautiful childhood friend Latika (Freida Pinto) is simple but effective because newcomer Dev Patel effortlessly displays the kind of innocent radiance that makes his character so engaging. Besides his run-ins with the jaded cop (Irfran Khan) and the unpredictable host, Jamal’s naïve approach to life is juxtaposed with his brother Salim’s callous way of street survival. Jamal’s Cinderella-run on the show excites the people of India, and for the film’s audience, it is irresistible to root for this foolhardy romantic.

More than a decade after the release of Trainspotting, the film that cemented Danny Boyle’s place in British cinema, it is still delightful to see another character of his diving into the shitter in a hilariously desperate situation. In serious terms, Slumdog Millionaire embodies all of Boyle’s strengths as a filmmaker. It has the adrenaline-rush of his zombie thriller 28 Days Later, the heartfelt poignancy of his children’s drama Millions and the mischievous humor present in all of his films. From Jean Renoir’s The River to Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, India has always captured the imagination of Western filmmakers. Amidst pressure from the studio to make the film in English, Danny Boyle manages to capture the beauty and chaos of the “maximum city” with a primarily local cast and crew, including brilliant performances by the child actors (who keep part of the film in Hindi). The slight reference to Indian superstar Amitabh Bachchan and the vivacious dance number during the end credits is a playful tribute to Bollywood cinema.

A film as lovable as Slumdog Millionaire still has a handful of detractors. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis says the film’s “joyfulness feels more like a filmmaker’s calculation than an honest cry from the heart about the human spirit.” While Danny Boyle’s film is meticulously engineered to dramatic perfection, it is unfair to criticize a filmmaker just because he is simply good at making his film thoroughly entertaining. The film is well-balanced with mainstream appeal and artistic merit, a rarity in modern day cinema. Whereas last year was filled with award-winning pictures about the dark side of human nature, Slumdog Millionaire proves that you don’t need a ruthless serial killer with a bad haircut to make a statement about the human experience.


Slumdog Millionaire opens at the Angelika Film Center, Houston on December 19.