A flight of fancy that never takes its eyes off the ground, “Slumdog Millionaire” is Bollywood through the off-kilter lens of Danny Boyle. The director of “Trainspotting,” “28 Days Later” and “Sunshine” may seem an odd choice for a movie about true love helping a young man win a game show and find happiness. But Boyle has always been adept at dredging up optimism even in the ugliest situations, and it’s his appreciation for grime, and the hope that lies beneath it, that make “Slumdog” a better movie than its parts would suggest.
The slumdog in question is Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), a chai-jockey at a call center in Mumbai. Through a number of complex twists of fate, he is one question away from winning the top prize of 20 million rupies on India’s version of that venerable game show institution, “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” The only problem is he’s been accused of cheating—after all, how can a kid from the slums know all the answers? Luckily for Jamal, the answers to each question all hearken back to his life in the slums. In a series of flashbacks, we see Jamal and his brother Salim grow up in Mumbai’s slums, narrowly escape a cruel orphanage/child begging ring and hustle their way into adulthood. No matter how dire the circumstances, Jamal remains indefatigable, driven by his love for Latika (Freida Pinto), a little girl he met as a child and for whom he carries a torch, no matter how many miles or years separate them.
“Slumdog” is an unapologetic fairy tale and Jamal’s ultimate destiny is as sweet (but not quite saccharine) as you’d expect. The journey there, however, is sour –and dirty and bloody and even a bit smelly. During one flashback, Salim traps Jamal inside a latrine just as the helicopter of Amitabh Bachchan, Jamal’s favorite actor, lands nearby. Desperate for his idol’s autograph, Jamal holds his nose, jumps down into a fetid soup of human waste and races toward the crowd around Bachchan. He gets the autograph, despite being covered in crap. There are riots, beatings, immolations and a vicious blinding—perhaps not out of place in a Brothers Grimm tale, but not the sort of thing found in the modern movie fairy tale cannon.
The rest of “Slumdog” proceeds similarly, with Jamal’s charmed life and plucky resolve colliding with Salim’s materialism and violent determination to make it out of the slums. There are a couple problems with that, the least of which is that Jamal’s virtue and single-minded pursuit of true love makes him far less compelling than Salim. As Salim, Madhur Mittal always looks nervous, questioning his own actions even as he acts on impulse, his outward cockiness masking his own conflict between protecting Jamal and stealing all that his brother has gained so effortlessly. Patel, though a passable actor in his own right, just isn’t as good and gets through the film mostly using his hangdog face and soulful eyes.
The conflict between the brothers should have been enough to drive the movie, but Simon Beaufoy’s screenplay (based on Vikas Swarup’s novel “Q & A”) is full of almost too many Dickensian complications and contrivances. A blind boy who Jamal encounters one afternoon turns out to be one the children Jamal and Salim left behind at the orphanage. Latika ends up married to the same gangster Salim works for, and so on. Not only must Jamal contend with his gangster brother and his lost love, but the host of “Millionaire” thinks he’s cheating. Game show hosts, apparently, are too cynical to believe in the work of destiny.
Danny Boyle isn’t so cynical, though, and he makes this fractured fairy tale hold together, even as the grittiness of the slums and the romantic optimism of Jamal threaten to overpower each other. The odd camera angles and quick, stream-of-consciousness cuts keep the action interesting enough to distract from the unbelievable coincidences. Boyle is not shy about capturing the grimy slums, all stacked up on hills of garbage, and those images make Jamal’s eventual triumph of destiny more satisfying than cloying. The outcome is inevitable, but just try stopping yourself from feeling a swell of nervous anticipation as Jamal answers that final, fateful question. The escape is temporary, but Boyle seems to recognize that making it out of the slums, even if just for a few moments in a fantasy, is worth all the rupies in the world.
