Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Slumdog Millionaire

by Ari

Slumdog Millionaire is an interesting film to consider. The director, Danny Boyle, is one of the most prolific and capable experimental and mainstream filmmakers working today, a storyteller who can jump from horror and sci-fi to children’s fable and now disney movie without losing his stylistic integrity and directorial ambition. Make no mistake, Slumdog Millionaire, the visually dazzling and exuberant new romantic odyssey, is very much as conventional, unrealistic and sentimental as the fantasy logic disney has made a reputation from. It’s all about destiny, coincidence and the unstoppable power of love, where the circumstances will always result in good no matter how difficult or dangerous the obstacle. As the film states, “it is written”.

In its effort to make you feel good, Boyle and his team have crafted an energetic and sweet package that overwhelms the viewer with ludicrous nonsense in order to send you dancing out of the theater with a smile. There’s a place for this type of storytelling (some of those disney movies have been successful at it), but I’m not sure it works in this particular setting, or maybe it’s just my particular distaste for romance that has no basis in reality. I don’t mind the “love conquers all” sensibility in escapist musicals, but here the childish notion of it (though the point of the film) seems too fake and excessive to really care .

The story centers around Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), an 18-year-old slumdog (he comes from poverty) who is one answer away from winning twenty million rupees on a game show in India. How a child from the slums could possibly know anything is miraculous to everyone in the film, so the story flashes back to his early childhood to show us how his personal experiences gave him all the answers he needed to succeed on the show. Each question has a back story (it becomes repetitive) as we watch Jamal grow from young boy to young man.

He and his brother Salim escape death after their mother is killed, fleeing from one place to another, one danger to the next, begging for money and barely surviving. Salim takes the direction of a gangster, while Jamal remains honest to his kind-hearted nature and undying love for a girl he meets as a child, Latika (Freida Pinto). After she disappears with Salim, Jamal spends the rest of the story chasing after her, entering the game show as a way to communicate his desire to find her. The ending, while truly absurd, is not exactly a stretch from the logic introduced near the beginning of the story.

The visual flourishes and exotic locations are certainly beautiful to take in, and the pulsing soundtrack features an eclectic mix of international and electronic music (sort of like Boyle’s The Beach), but in the end it amounts to nothing more than a mildly entertaining diversion. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with a film that just wants to be sweet and entertaining (in fact one of my favorite films of the year is exactly that), but Slumdog Millionaire’s all-surface approach never hits a single chord of truth. It can be simple, but there still has to be something to it, right? Is fluff ever really that memorable?