December 25, 2009
''It is written.''
The story of the life of an impoverished Indian teen Jamal Malik, who becomes a contestant on the Hindi version of "Who Wants to be A Millionaire?", wins, and is then suspected of cheating.
Dev Patel: Jamal Malik
Winner of the Audience ...( read more)Award at the Toronto Film Festival, Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan's radical Slumdog Millionaire is the feel-good story of an orphaned, street-wise young man trying to strike gold on India's version of the TV show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" while hoping that the girl he has loved since childhood is watching. Based on the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup and supported by the stunning cinematography of Anthony Dod Mantle and the music of A.R. Rahman, Slumdog shows us the chaos of Mumbai (formerly Bombay) India where it was filmed. Submerging the viewer in a cacophony of colour and sound, the camera swoops and swirls in an often dizzying pace, taking us from the desolation of back alleys and garbage dumps to modern high rises and the fantastic beauty of the Taj Mahal.
Boyle has nine different non-professional actors in three different time frames, each faithfully representing their character as they grow and develop. In the opening scene, the hero Jamal Malik, brilliantly performed by Dev Patel, is being questioned by Police Inspector (Irrfan Khan) who simply cannot understand how a mere slumdog like Jamal, without any education, can answer question after question on the game show without resorting to lying or cheating. In a city of 13 million people where the police know they can get away with almost anything, the methods of torture used to extract a confession are graphically displayed. With Jamal, however, they only succeed in uncovering the deeper layers of his character as the film flashes back to specific incidents in his life that reveal how his knowledge was gained by personal experience.
He knows, for example, that the star of the 1973 film Zanjeer was Amitabh Bachchan because he was his favourite actor/idol as a little boy and was willing to cover himself with filth just to get his autograph. Built on memory, the film relives Jamal's life from the death of his mother, to his entry into service to a cynical gangster who turns street children into blind beggars, reminding us of the millions of third-world children, not as lucky as Jamal, who fight against unending poverty each day. Jamal is fortunate to have allies, however: his brother Salim(Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail) and Latika (Rubina Ali), another orphan that Jamal becomes attached to form the "Three Musketeers", ready to do battle with the world.
Salim reminding me of a City Of God result for his character, whom inevitably also redeems himself, while showing God as a salvation for greed and killing.
Though circumstances lead the three into different areas when they become adults, Salim (Madhur Mittai) into the criminal underworld, Latika (Freida Pinto) to be kept by a rich man, and Jamal to become a chai wallah, a server of tea to telemarketers. However Jamal does not give up, knowing that his life is governed by destiny, fate and ruled by unending love. Using their wits to survive, the funniest scenes include Jamal and Salim finding themselves as tour guides at the Taj Mahal, inventing stories or the part where Jamal is locked inside an outhouse while his childhood hero star Amitabh is outside signing autographs; escape involves having to go through smelly excrement. Highly amusing and the child actors maintain the harshness and innocence realistically similarly to City of God.
The center of the film, however, revolves around Jamal's contesting for millions of rupees on the game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire"; not necessarily to become rich but to woo his soulmate Latika whom he knows is a fan of the show.
We cheer for Jamal to win his fortune and most importantly, to get his love back. While we are aware that the story is an unlikely fantasy, we also know that as barriers between individuals and nations break down and the world moves toward a greater sense of unity, the distinction between what is possible is broken down into a singularity. Slumdog Millionaire may be the best film of the year, while in real life headlines telling us daily that the economy is dying, and that climate change threatens our very existence; a film that is a pure celebration of life is welcomed with open arms. Danny Boyle gives us his best film yet.
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