Movie Notes: Slumdog Millionaire

January 2nd, 2009

= 5 stars

Starring Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Madhur Mittal
Directed by Danny Boyle

Synopsis

Jamal (Dev Patel) is about to win a huge amount of money on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. His uncanny ability to answer all the questions stems from tumultuous, impoverished childhood experiences with his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) and orphan girl, Latika (Freida Pinto).

The Good

• Boyle’s mesmerizing, aggressive direction, constantly flitting to different subjects, and with amazingly inventive flourishes like askew subtitles, stop motion, jumping around in time, and bold angles. The end result is claustrophobic, constantly inventive, like a jazz improvisation. However bombastic it all seems, I felt it was all justified to convey the constant struggle for survival of the two desperately poor brothers, Jamal and Salim.
• Crosses a bewildering swath of Indian society, from the extreme third-world poverty amid garbage heaps to the bleeding edge of high-tech globalization and cash-infused influence of the West. There’s an epic feel as we swing from religious conflict to the Taj Mahal and eventually chai in a boiler-room call center. The capitalist promise of the West is summed up by the game show itself, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, a western import layered atop the hopes and dreams of a rural nation striving to be middle class. At the same time is a bit of guilt that entire nations are hard at work struggling to earn admission into a culture we take for granted.
• The core is an exaggerated underdog story, a classic movie staple, but with enough variations to keep it wholly entertaining (note that the game show is intertwined throughout rather than saving the “big game” for the very end). The “origin story” is so shockingly brutal that when the happy ending arrives, it feels earned, and we feel the characters really deserve some happiness.
• Great soundtrack, including an artist I was mesmerized by a while back, M.I.A.
• I’ll admit to preferring films with favorite actors, so for a film with nobody I’d ever heard to win me over completely, deserves mentioning.
• A classic, destiny-tinged romance between Jamal and Latika that most people will latch onto, but with all the other good stuff going on I felt it was an neat bonus to an already solid movie.

The Bad

• Really tired of the tilted-camera thing — but I’ll blame Battlefield Earth and Hal Hartley for ruining my tolerance of this technique, rather than Boyle.

Conclusion

I saw Slumdog Millionaire mainly on the strength of Boyle’s other movies (Sunshine, 28 Days Later, and Trainspotting) and wasn’t disappointed. The story’s happy ending feels earned, and along the way you get to enjoy a director somehow able to make music with a camera. Highly recommended.

IMDB: Slumdog Millionaire
Wikipedia: Slumdog Millionaire
Rotten Tomatoes: Slumdog Millionaire 94%