Slumdog Millionaire (***½)

Directed by: Danny Boyle
Starring: Dev patel, Freida Pinto, Anil Kapoor, Irfan Khan
Seen: March 6th 2009

***½ Out of ****

Slumdog Millionaire won eight Oscars at the Academy Awards just over two weeks ago and that, quite understandably, made me very excited to see it. It didn’t disappoint. It didn’t blow me away either, like some critics claimed it would. I’ve seen only three of the five nominees for best picture, and I have to say I found the other two (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Frost/Nixon) to be superior films to Slumdog Millionaire, both taking on, in my humble opinion, something bigger. That said, let’s get down to Slumdog Millionaire.

Jamal Malik (Patel) is one question away from winning 20-million Rupees in India’s game show ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire?’ as the episode winds down and leaves the last question for the next evening. The game show host Prem Kumar (Kapoor) thinks it a sure impossibility that a slumdog (someone who grew up in the Mumbai slums) could know all the answers, so he hands him over for interrogation during that night. While torturing Jamal, the police inspector, played by Irfan Khan, slowly starts thinking that Jamal might be able to explain things, and as he starts to go through the questions with Jamal, we see, through flashbacks, Jamal’s story, and how, at certain points during his life, he actually learned the answers to all the questions asked.

The film is, simply put, a love story. Jamal has a life-long singular love for Latika, who he meets as a young orphan, and this forms the core of the film. Jamal and his brother Salim, after the murder of their mother in the 1993 anti-Muslim attacks in Mumbai, are on the run that night, and in the frenzy of escaping and the pouring rain, they also link up with a young girl, Latika, who becomes part of their little posse. They live as young drifters on a rubbish heap, living from scraps as best they can, and one day a friendly man, Maman, picks them up and takes them to an orphanage he runs. The children see this as some sort of Utopia, but as we later realise, not all is right. When they move on from the orphanage, Latika is left behind, and Jamal searches for her everywhere and any way he can for the rest of the film.

Slumdog Millionaire has been slammed for romanticising slum-life, but that could not be further from the truth. It shows us that children will play as much as they can whatever the circumstances, and revels in the beauty children can find in even the simplest of places, and also(very luckily, I think), does not combine what we see with how things would smell in real life. The latrines on the outskirts of town are nothing but wooden huts with holes in the floor, which makes for a disgustingly endearing scene near the start of the film, but which would probably have been beyond shocking if we were able to smell it. Everywhere we go we see rubbish strewn everywhere, and the conditions cannot seem worse, yet things do get worse as corrupt influences, even in a seemingly well-meaning orphanage, also become apparent.

Slumdog Millionaire is a beautiful love-story in a very dirty and colourful world, you’ll definitely walk out of the cinema with a smile. The film is well-made, with director Danny Boyle using very interesting camera angles and snappy editing. I really enjoyed the film, and even in its display of some of the horrors of life, it shows us that love can still trump it all. It is, however, still just a love story when all is said and done, and all the small adages and extras in the film are almost forgotten by the time the end-credits roll and you walk out of the cinema with you soul soaring from the beauty of the conclusion. Slumdog Millionaire is the very definition of a feel good movie.