Slumdog Millionaire

From Edinburgh to Mumbai, via Hollywood or Bollywood (sort of), Danny Boyle has now looked at the dystopian underclass nationally and internationally, as an outsider looking in.

In Slumdog Millionaire he teams with screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty), another digger in the lower-class shoals, to illuminate Mumbai's 19,000,000 teeming masses through the lens of an 18-year-old illiterate "slumdog's" unlikely rise to fame and possible millionaire status through appearances on the Indian version of "Who Wants to be a Milionaire?" Based on Nikas Swarup's "Q&A," the story encapsulates young Jamal's surprisingly correct answers to a series of increasingly difficult questions leading to the ultimate prize, interrupted at the last minute off-camera by torture aimed at discovering how, bafflingly, an illiterate boy could know these answers-- he must be cheating!

Following is a series of flashbacks indicating painstakingly how in each instance he came to actual knowledge of the correct answer. We follow in these scenes how a 7-year-old Jamal and his slightly older brother Salim survive the death of their mother in sectarian rioting and their hardscrable existence growing up alone -- and Jamal's near-magical interaction with a young contemporary girl, Latika, also a lone slumdog.

Interspersed between episodes of the TV quiz show, we come to see how Jamal has not just learned but lived his correct answers. We hopscotch through a kaleidoscopic Mumbai with Jamal's high-road journey counterpoised against Samil's downward, criminal spiral. Against an incredibly colorful background -- captured evocatively by the camera of Anthony Dod Mantle (Last King of Scotland) -- we see vignettes sewn together with Dickensian characters in a Sir Walter Scott world that examines class structure and substructure.

The TV show quizmaster Prem (Bollywood star Amil Kapoor) is himself a climber from the lower class who feels threatened by the growing notoriety of Jamal, and instigates his torture by the police, in the course of which, among other things, we learn of the separation of Jamal and Latika. The latter half of the film is devoted to the reunion of the two.

Dev Patel (who actually grew up in London) plays or, more properly, brilliantly underplays Jamal; his affectlessness compellingly underscores the Latika (Freida Pinto)--Jamal interactions. The elder Salim (Madhur Mattel) subtly evokes the contradictory elements of his character's fractured psyche.

Danny Boyle is enamored of Mumbai, and it shows. He practically caresses the landscape, drawing a legitimately heartwarming story out of a plot that could just as easily and realistically end in tragedy. But he buys his ending credibly, though his literal, musical ending -- with credits rolling -- bears no relation whatsoever to the plot, but in the great Bollywood tradition, is lavish, exuberant, and incredible fun.

                                                           Howard Buck