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 In Cinemas from Thursday Dec 18 [MA15+]
Director: Danny Boyle
Runtime: 120mins
Danny Boyle has made a few movies with the motif of bags of money and what people will do to get them. Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, A Life Less Ordinary and Millions all explored this theme in different ways and to different degrees. Slumdog Millionaire is another for that list, telling the story of Jamal Malik (Dev Patel as an adult, Tanay Chheda and Ayush Mahesh Khedekar as a boy), a Mumbai slum-dweller who goes on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? After getting too many of the questions right for his own good, Jamal is accused of cheating. Under arrest he’s forced to tell his entire life story to explain how a poor boy whose only achievement is getting a job at a call centre comes to know so much.
The underdog story of the guy who rings you up to offer a free mobile phone upgrade is told as deliciously melodramatically as a Charles Dickens novel or a Bollywood movie, though it saves the big dance number for the credits. There’s betrayal, loyalty, love and crime and all the Oliver Twist elements, told in flashback alongside Jamal’s quiz show performance. Even though we know the outcome, the game show scenes remain riveting. The tension is maintained exquisitely by the show’s format and dun-dun-DAH soundtrack, especially when it isn’t broken by ad breaks.
Boyle doesn’t shy away from submerging us, or his characters, in the filth of life in the slums. Sometimes it’s like the Monty Python middle ages where you can tell someone’s the king because he’s the person not covered in shit. Instead of just wallowing in the grime though, he shows a wide cross-section of life and there are moments where the city gets to shine. The Taj Mahal is still glorious when shown from the point of view of its beggars and scroungers and the Bombay mega-slums being turned into a toweringly modern Mumbai business district is a sight to behold. The city’s frenetic nature is illustrated by the pounding soundtrack, which makes good use of M.I.A. among others.
There’s some unnecessary nonsense about destiny briefly shoehorned in to explain the coincidences, but apart from that it’s another gripping and outrageously stylish movie exploring Boyle’s favourite theme. Also to his credit, a decent amount of the dialogue is in Hindi and subtitled elegantly in boxes that sit high in the picture rather than being exiled to the bottom.
****½
JODY MACGREGOR
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