Slumdog Millionaire - A Must See

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Anyone that’s ever participated in a trivia night knows that sometimes you find the answers in the oddest places.  I once correctly answered a question about Gunga Din, not because I’m a Rudyard Kipling aficionado but because I saw an adaptation of the poem on an episode of The Famous Adventures Of Mr. Magoo.   Slumdog Millionaire takes this conceit to new heights.  Directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later) Slumdog Millionaire takes place in India and tells the story of Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) and his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal).  Jamal and Salim, orphaned at an early age, are referred to colloquially as “slumdogs,” a derogatory term for uneducated street urchins that eke out a meager existence through varying combinations of begging, conning tourists and outright theft. 

As the movie opens, Jamal is on the Hindi version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.  He is one question away from winning the grand prize when the show runs of time and he is asked to come back the following evening.  (That’s not a spoiler by the way.  It’s literally the first thing they tell you.)  Suspected of cheating, he is abducted/arrested by the police and roughed up.  He’s then forced to go through his entire Millionaire run question-by-question explaining just exactly how he knew the answer to each question.  As he progresses through each round, we learn more about his life growing up on the streets of Mumbai.  Seemingly innocuous events provide answers later in life: a childhood song learned in school, a piece of foreign currency given to a friend, the name of an American inventor and on and on.  Jamal is the Kaiser Soze of quiz shows. 

Sometimes the answers are buried in the most painful of memories.  Living on the street at when they were both younger than ten, Jamal and Salim are taken in by Maman.  Maman is a sort of Indian Fagin, taking in abandoned children and teaching them the ins and outs of begging.  However, Maman is a much darker figure than Dickens’ Fagin (no mean feat).  Jamal’s motivation for competing on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire is that his childhood love Latika (Freida Pinto), whom he’s lost track of, watches the show religiously.  His interest is not to win the money (well, ok, maybe a little bit).  But his primary concern is to find his love. 

A large portion of the story’s flashback is told with child actors all which perfectly embody their respective characters.  The movie bounces back and forth quite a bit but Boyle’s direction is never rudderless.  You always know who you’re seeing and what’s going on.  Slumdog Millionaire is mash-up of the highest degree: part love story, party urban street drama, part Dickensian fairy tale, part travelogue of India’s seedy underbelly.  The film is a joyous rollercoaster ride of emotion.  It’s a crowd-pleaser of the highest order; an ebullient, exuberant ode to life and perseverance.  Boyle’s gritty depiction of urban squalor is told with dramatic camera angles and fast-paced editing that somehow perfectly fuses with this enchanted fable without undermining the sentimental (but not overly so) romance that is ultimately the movie’s heart.  Boyle somehow manages to create a story like no other yet simultaneously as old as time. 

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being Great Expectations and 1 being Get Rich Or Die Tryin’, Slumdog Millionaire gets a 9.

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