reviewed

The short version is that Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire is the absolute most fun you will have being disturbed by views of the filth, poverty, cruelty, and extensive slums of Mumbai. When he directed the almost hilariously bad Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle, The Beach, Boyle proved that he is not immune to bad ideas–it’s just that he seems to be fearless and intent on touching every genre and every deeply human emotion that he can with no regard for career consistency or pigeonholing. I mean that in a good way.

You may remember him for 28 Days Later, a gritty zombie flick, or Trainspotting, one of the oddest and most disturbing looks at drug culture ever filmed. You probably don’t know him, but should, for the near-perfect family film Millions and the ambitious, flawed science fiction drama Sunshine. While Slumdog might not rise quite to level of Millions, it is a certain triumph. It’s directed with exhilarating energy bumped up by a great soundtrack.

The movie opens with a viciousness that surprised me and some of the early going is rough. Never bad in terms of acting or production, but rough emotionally (and including one, cringe-inducing, disgusting scene that proved Jamal’s personality from a very young age). Get past that and there are surprising spikes of humor, beauty, love, and color that keep the moral seriousness from becoming oppressively heavy.

Going in, one thing to note is that it is not an Indian movie; it is a movie about India. While a good portion of the film’s dialogue is delivered in Hindi, and while there are touches of Masala and Bollywood’s finest, the movie is rooted in Western style filmmaking. That gives it an Indian taste but with a structure and style that is familiar for Western audiences. It’s not Bollywood Lite, it’s more a cross-polination of some of the better bits of all of the above but very definitely helmed by Western sensibilities.

The story, framed by his rough interrogation at the hands of police who think he cheated at India’s version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, is about the experiences that gave him the knowledge to fulfill what the script sees as his destiny. As orphans in the megaslum of Mumbai, Jamal and his older brother Samir, are subjected to horrors and brutality, their circumstances revealing their basic natures; Jamal’s perseverance and basic good, Samir’s churlish cruelties and viciousness. This structure could have worked to kill the flow of the film, but the story is so compelling , the direction so good, and the dialogue and acting so believable that the movie never drags or falters.

The view of India could hardly be described as a love letter. This is the first non-documentary movie that I’ve seen that reflected the poverty and filth of the country in a way that I could almost smell. It showed, too, the color, the vibrancy, the sense of humor, and the spirit of the Indian people. While the reality of India may not be fully on display, the complexity of India is; it’s religious difficulties, corruption, poverty, entrepreneurial spirit, art, and beauty are all glimpsed in the weave of the story. It’s a simple tale peopled with very real characters.

Which is one of the things that I love so much about Boyle’s movies. He cares enough about the characters to explore them fully, allowing them to become much more than cardboard cutouts. He invests his energy in his characters in a way that pulls viewers in emotionally.

Millions (oh, yes, especially Millions with its many saints), Sunshine, and Slumdog all exhibit elements of magical realism in allowing the characters to escape the strict bounds of reality to explore their motivations and the nature of right and wrong. The worlds he creates are real enough to feel familiar but magical enough to allow for the fantastic. In Slumdog that manifests mostly in the coincidences–manifestations of destiny–in the young man’s life that gives him the experiences he needs to answer each of the increasingly hard questions on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. At a subtle point in the movie where he doesn’t know the answer, the solution comes in simply doing the right thing in a way demonstrating that, beyond the fantastic, it’s the basic nature of Jamal that leads him forward. While fantastic coincidences may have given him most of the answers, his moral core is what makes him worthy of the reward. This fairy tale reveals the value of Jamal’s character as it also reveals the value of the life that he has lived.

In this view of India, there is abundant violence and cruelty, but perseverance, love, and moral actions are also rewarded. Not easily, not perfectly, and not always–but the potential for good is celebrated and an almost American sense of the potential for redemption sneaks in there, too.

Intriguingly–and difficultly since I don’t want to toss any spoilers into the mix–there is also great moral weight attached to actions that are at very least understandable if not quite good (in a moral sense). In particular, one act of violence propels Jamal’s brother to a series of increasingly vile acts. By the final act, viewers will have a hard time finding much sympathy for the man, buy they will have understood how his basic nature and his choices brought him from a little boy in the slums to end up working for a well-connected crime figure. The progression, fueled by the results of his decisions, is never forced.

The opening of the movie features a quiz show moment where the audience is asked how Jamal knew the answers to the quiz show questions. It gives these options: he is lucky, he is a genius, he is a cheater, or it is written. The answer is obvious, of course, but the joy of the movie is in discovering the truth of that answer.

And through all of the ugliness–there are some especially heart-rending moments featuring children early in the film–it ends with such energy and vigor that I walked out feeling energized and hopeful. Which, given the realism of all the bad bits, is in itself a miracle. This works in part because Boyle takes his characters and the moral nature of the world seriously but doesn’t make it so weighty that the journey becomes onerous to the viewer. He celebrates the joy, too.

See the movie for the acting, the vibrant direction, the energy, the great writing, the story, and the human insights. See it for the way it will make you feel at the end. See it for the gorgeously rendered vision of India, both the beautiful and the ugly. See it for its quirky sense of humor. See it because Danny Boyle is a fearless filmmaker who celebrates the hearts of his characters.

Brilliant stuff.

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