FILM REVIEW: Slumdog Millionaire – From Rags to Raja
“Trainspotting” director Danny Boyle’s new film, “Slumdog Millionaire,” just won the 2008 Oscar for best picture, and with good reason. Set in the slums of modern India, “Slumdog Millionaire” is a frenetic tour de force –rhythmic, fast-paced, visually arresting, and ultimately hopeful. “I knew the answers,” says the film’s protagonist, Indian Muslim Jamal Malik, whom we see being tortured in the film’s opening moments. Turns out, he’s just won a big pile of rupees on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.” one of India’s hottest TV game shows. All good, right?
Nope. Those in authority (including the game show host) think he cheated his way to the answers, and punish him to determine how he knows what he knows.
In the film, Jamal’s life story is told in a series of flashbacks touching on seminal moments from his impoverished life in the Indian slums. We see a young Jamal plunge himself into a pile of outhouse waste, watch as his mother is killed in the Hindu-on-Muslim violence of a local riot, view the forced maiming and blinding of young poor Indian kids to attract much-needed rupees by opportunistic adults, and witness human conflagration and abject poverty of the most gut-wrenching sort. We also see a chance encounter between Jamal and a young girl, Lakita, blossom into a friendship, and then romance – in true Hollywood/ Bollywood fashion.
How “Slumdog” plays out is worth the watching, and I won’t give anything away here. As a director, Boyle’s genius is not to preach, but rather to rub together the most disturbing dialectical sets of images (rich versus poor, Western versus Indian, Hindu versus Muslim, kid versus adult) with the most uplifting glimpses of what could be, given a bit of chance, no small measure of luck, and the star-crossed circumstances of fate. In doing so, Boyle personalizes one individual’s chance “rags to raja” story, mixes it with a whole heap of wrinkles, twists and turns thrown in for good measure, and paints a captivating and visually arresting film.
And there are a deeper cross-cultural fissures here, too, captured in the fierce and ongoing global online debates about the movie and its significance. When “Slumdog Millionaire” won the Oscar last month for Best Picture, “residents of Mumbai’s slums celebrated,” explains one online pundit. “In contrast, Indian activists and intellectuals who have decried the movie for its portrayal of poverty and violence and its alleged exploitation of child actors and slum dwellers lamented the victory, claiming that the movie is a flawed Western interpretation of Mumbai.” “This claim, however,” the writer concludes, “overlooks both the film’s basic faithfulness to the novel by Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup on which it is based, and Bollywood’s own tradition of uplifting stories.”
Fair enough. And for American audiences, the film is sure to continue the debate about the roots and nature of global poverty and the excesses of this thing called “globalization” in its current incarnation. Ultimately, “Slumdog Millionaire” is a story that strikes multiple chords with American audiences at a time of economic meltdown and tremendous uncertainty about our future.
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