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Slumdog Millionaire Review
05 Jan 2009
Critics rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Reviewed by Tom Charity , LOVEFiLM
Slumdog Millionaire

Only three 2008 films broke into the Internet Movie Database all-time Top 50 last year. The Dark Knight (#5), WALL-E (#34), and Slumdog Millionaire (#45).

That’s some tribute to Danny Boyle?s high-energy Indian melodrama – after all, it has had nothing like the exposure of the other, mega-budget offerings, and outside of its London Film Festival closing slot it hasn’t even shown on home turf yet.

In case you have missed the buzz, this is the story of Jamal (Dev Patel, from TV’s Skins), an uneducated chai-boy who – as the movie begins – is one answer away from the 20 million rupee grand prize in the local version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”.

Cast details

It’s an improbable turn of events – so improbable, in fact, that the show’s presenter-producer (Anil Kapoor) has the young man bundled off and interrogated by the police before taping the next show. Is he a cheat? A genius? Just plain lucky? Or is something more mysterious still at play here?

The movie unfolds in flashback during the interrogation, as Jamal explains how he knew each answer – explanations that also serve to give us his life story: how he grew up in the slums of Mumbai with his brother Salim; how they were orphaned; fell into the hands of villains; and eventually escaped to make their own way in the world.

It’s also a love story: Jamal repeatedly crosses paths with Latika (played as a young woman by Freida Pinto), the love of his life and also the reason he’s on the show.

Slumdog Millionaire: Ayush Mahesh Khedeka, Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, Rubina Ali

These bare bones give very little sense of the film’s appeal, which is all about the bravura storytelling, the violence and comedy, romanticism and poverty, all spilling across, over and into each other in a style oddly reminiscent of Boyle?s biggest previous hit, Trainspotting.

An early scene in which the young Jamal plunges into a cesspool automatically reminds us of Ewan McGregor?s adventures in the filthiest toilet in Scotland – though the scene was the invention of screenwriter Simon "The Full Monty" Beaufoy, and was written before Boyle was attached to the project. It’s hard to say why exactly, but both scenes are crucial to the success of the movies – fashioning unexpectedly crowd-pleasing moments from a reality that is, literally, s***. It’s as if Boyle confronts us with our worst imagining of a certain kind of depravity, and then gives it a liberating, comic fillip. You only have to see the movie in a crowded cinema to feel how the audience appreciates that permission to laugh and enjoy the show.

Inevitably some people will have misgivings about such levity – as if Boyle is making light of other people’s suffering. But what makes the movie work is the life force that runs through it, the vigor and vitality of its young hero (played by three different actors over the course of the movie). You can tell that the filmmakers were dazzled by India – and not the James Ivory Heritage India of EM Forster and cricket, but the whole stinking, beautiful shebang: the smells and the colours, the corruption and the spirituality, the slums and even the call centres. Boyle gives us the whole sensory overload, and from the ground up: the child’s point of view. It’s immediate and vivid and true.

There's terrific verve about this movie, an appetite for life that beggars such pedantry.

Over the next two months we’re about to be deluged with worthy Oscar-contenders about “important” subjects. Most of them are worth seeing and one or two are very good, but none of them is as purely enjoyable on a visceral level as Slumdog Millionaire.

Ironically, for a while it looked as if it might not get distributed in the US at all. I was lucky enough to see it at its second public outing, at the Toronto Film Festival, and already Boyle (who introduced the screening) was trying to dampen down expectations. I don’t think his caution was necessary, but of course there will be a backlash, as there always is. We might as well admit from the start that Slumdog Millionaire is contrived; that the early sequences with the young children are more successful than the melodramatic climax; and that it doesn’t generate profound insights into the human soul.

So what? There’s terrific verve about this movie, an appetite for life that beggars such pedantry. It’s a ride and a trip, and you come out of it exhilarated by the experience.

Slumdog Millionaire Reviews

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