Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
Grade:A-
There’s a reason that director Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire came out of nowhere a few months ago, winning the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival and continuing on to take the majority of Best Picture prizes this awards season: it’s a damned entertaining film, made with panache and acted with authenticity and subtlety.
Using the game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? as a framing device, the film is the story of Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), a contestant on the show accused of cheating because a poor “slumdog” like himself couldn’t possibly know the answers to the questions he continues to answer correctly. Through extensive flashbacks about his life, we see how he came to know the answers.
The pleasures of the film are many, but let’s start with the acting. Danny Boyle has cast virtually all unknowns for the leads, and they’re all fantastic. As we learn about Jamal’s childhood (he’s played in flashback by Tanay Hemant Chheda and Ayush Mahesh Khedekar), living on the street with his brother Salim (played in present-day by Madhur Mittal and in flashback by Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala and Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail), there are harrowing events that the younger actors have to sell, and it’s simply stunning what these kids can pull off, especially considering their lack of any sort of training. As Jamal and Salim try to survive on the streets of India, Jamal befriends another orphan, Latika. Theirs is the central love story of the film (more on that in a bit), and it should also be mentioned that the three actresses who play Latika (Rubiana Ali, Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar, and Freida Pinto) are equally impressive, the younger ones getting the least screen time but needing to accomplish the task of endearing not only Jamal but the audience to themselves. They both accomplish this feat with little fanfare.
What catapults this film into near-greatness is how deft all the filmmaking is. A lot of effort clearly had to go into this film, but it all comes across as nothing – like they dropped a camera into the midst of the action and filmed it all. The screenplay, adapted from Vikas Swarup’s novel Q & A by Simon Beaufoy, is so adept at accomplishing many different tasks at once: the film functions as a rags-to-riches tale, it functions as a film about organized crime, it’s a story about brothers and their complex relationship, it’s about modern India – it’s about a lot of things. But it primarily functions as a romance. Jamal’s motivation for going on the game show in the first place is to attract Latika’s attention, and as the final reel of the film unfurls, it’s riveting watching their love story come to a close. Their history is so effectively setup throughout the bulk of the film that you can’t help but root for them to end up together.
It simply all works. There’s virtually no element of this film that feels underdeveloped or mishandled in any major way. My only complaints are minor, namely that the film is a tad long and really only soars in the final thirty minutes, but it’s hard to fault a film for being very good for the first 75% and then totally awesome for the last 25%.
I wish all films had that “problem.”
Slumdog Millionaire is a simple – though far from simplistic – story told clearly and told well, with a thoughtful visual style and strong acting across the board from a taught script. Is there anything else one could want from a movie?
Bottom Line:
It’s a crowd-pleaser in the most trite sense of the word – it’s a film that exists solely to entertain and please its audience. It’s a movie that works on every level, pulling its audience into a foreign world, then making that world every bit as familiar as our own.
© 2004-2009 Ben Waldorf. Posted December 22, 2008. IMDB