Category | Arts & Living

Movie Review: Slumdog Millionaire

Published on March 24, 2009 by Daniel Singleton

Danny Boyle needs stronger Ritalin—or less crack.  “Slumdog Millionaire,” a cracked-out mix of realism and fantasy, starts by showing us a side of India the tourism department likes to ignore—the gritty, crime-ridden, rat-infested slums of Mumbai—then flips 180 degrees and becomes the kind of classic, rags-to-riches, orphans-in-peril, long-lost-love story that Charles Dickens loved to write.

The movie borrows its basic story from Vikas Swarup’s book “Q and A,” but it’s less adaptation than homage. Boyle would rather capture the book’s frantic pace, colorful background details and buoyant tone than film its commas.

Both the book and movie follow a young Mumbai orphan as he travels around India, scampering, struggling and scheming to survive. The details are different, but they both have the same mix of slums, mansions and orphanages; movie stars and quiz shows; telemarketing offices and tourist traps; Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, British and American culture that come to mind when you hear the word “India.”  The movie is less episodic than the book, but two-hour movies you watch in one sitting need more focus than books you read in a week.

But how do you link twelve crazy episodes that jump halfway across India without killing our disbelief?  Easy.  Add a love story that spans fifteen years and thousands of miles.  I can imagine the meetings.

Danny, this excursion to the Taj Mahal feels too random.  The hero was living in an orphanage less than two pages ago; now he’s halfway across the country posing as a tour guide? Just write some dialogue in scene two where he complains about missing the girl he met in scene one.  Not only will it hold the story together, it’ll make it ten times easier to love.  You cheer up when a poor slumdog wins two million rupees, but you rip off your shirt and spin it around your head when he wins two million rupees and finds his childhood girlfriend. Trust me. I know from experience.

Good ol’ Danny Boyle. Swarup knows how to tell a story—who could forget the boy who speaks gibberish?—but pictures speak louder than words and Boyle paints brilliant pictures. He cranks up the music, cuts between shots as quickly as a crazy butcher and fills the screen with beautiful, beautiful color. In one great shot, shadows dance in front of the screen while the slumdog’s dead mother lies facedown in a pool of water. In another, we see the heroine refracted through dozens of little windows.

The movie can be depressing.  The torture scenes, riots, murders and orphanage sequences are downright brutal.  But the heroes never lose hope and neither does the movie, which feels happy and alive—happy to be alive—even when it’s buried in ugliness.  Some people have attacked Boyle and Swarup for making life in the slums look fun, but I think they’re saying something about positive thinking. We’ll meet crooked cops and evil game show hosts during our lives, we’ll live in shitty orphanages and we’ll lose our entire family to angry mobs, but if we run fast and smile hard, we might win twenty million rupees and the girl of our dreams.