Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

It seems this movie is getting a multitude of positive remarks for a reason! It was so good! Based on the book Q and A by Vikas Swarup, Slumdog Millionaire weaves together multiple time periods to detail one young man's life from the slums of Mumbai to the hot seat of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) is an 18-year-old assistant/tea-bringer (chai-wallah) for a phone company who has somehow managed to make it to the final question on the show. During a day-long break before the last round, he is interrogated by a police inspector (Irfan Khan) on suspicion of cheating. As they relive the show question by question, Jamal's backstory unfolds and we learn exactly how he knew the answers. He started life in the slums with just his mother and older brother Salim. After falling victim to an anti-Muslim attack on his town when he is a boy, he and Salim flee and live in a trash dump for a while with fellow refugee Latika. They are soon picked up by a ruthless modern-day Fagin named Maman, who uses children to beg for him. He picks Selim to be his child-beating "dog" and pushes him to be hard and cold, while Latika and Jamal become closer and protective of each other.

Eventually the brothers escape but are forced to leave Latika behind. They become con artists for several years until Jamal convinces Salim to seriously search for Latika, who they find was now working for Maman as a dancer with "virginal" appeal. After rescuing her, Jamal is separated from the other two, and moves on to work for the phone company. He is reunited with Latika (now grown as Freida Pinto) a seemingly final time, but discovers that both she and Salim are trapped in crime lord Javed's (Mahesh Manjrekar) organization and unable (or too scared) to get out. Jamal sees Latika's favourite show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, as his last chance to make an appeal to her to get away from her miserable life and be with him.

Though the whole "torture/interrogation because maybe he cheated on a tv show" thing seemed a bit much, it was a perfect high-intensity situation to expound Jamal's unique and thrilling story. I was surprised by how intrigued I was by the plot alone- not only was it novel and fascinating, but it was told in such an interesting way that it was hard not to be sucked in by the back-and-forth between the interrogation, tv show, and flashbacks. It's just a really great concept to explore someone's life through random trivia questions. The actors were all wonderful, and the three ages of Jamal especially: the endearing Ayush Mahesh Khedekar, precocious Tanay Chheda, and sincere Dev Patel. Danny Boyle made great use of his child actors, most of whom were inexperienced, eliciting honest performances without straying into over-sappiness.

I'm surprised this is being called a "feel-good" movie. Though it has a happy ending, the journey to that conclusion is rough and violent, full of loss and fear. Also a lot of chasing (Danny Boyle is always trying to show us how good he is at filming running scenes with good music). The music, incidentally, is swell, with several well-placed MIA tracks and a lovely original score by AR Rahman. One thing I think is too bad, but unrelated to how much I like the film, is that the co-director Loveleen Tandan seems to barely be acknowledged in most reviews. It's always "Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire". Not a big thing, but I wonder how much she did for the movie and what sort of trademarks or ideas she may have contributed, especially considering Boyle's critically hit-and-miss track record. Anyway it's a fairly magnificent film overall: engaging, at once heart-breaking and heart-warming, and a really well-told story of survival, love, and destiny.

4.5/5