"Slumdog Millionaire"

BOOMERANGST: Boyle Does Bollywood

By Roy Trakin

Take an Irish-Catholic filmmaker, add a dash of Dickensian stratified society, a TV quiz show that started in the U.K. but became a world phenomenon, a screenplay by the Brit (Simon Beaufoy) who penned The Fuly Monty, based on a novel by an Indian diplomat (Vikas Swarup), then set the resulting movie in the teeming city of Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, and what have you got?

Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire is an unabashedly, old-fashioned Hollywood-meets-Bollywood romance for today’s rapidly shrinking global universe, brought together by a combination of Western popular culture imports, outsourced cell phone sales teams and, above all, hope.

With the rush of colorful images and characters living on the edge that marked his most successful film to date, Trainspotting, Boyle plunges us into the exotic world of present-day India in all its contradictions, the ancient and timeless co-existing with the modern, as the “slums” of its title encroach on the skyscrapers being built right alongside them. The mostly Indian cast features Dev Patel’s Jamal Malik and the lovely Freida Pinto’s Latika as star-crossed would-be lovers who meet as children when their parents are massacred in an anti-Muslim slaughter, and spend the rest of the movie trying to get back together again, no thanks to Jamal’s rambunctious older brother, Madhur Mittal’s Salim.

The epic film covers their childhood and adolescence adventures, with the three principals being played by three different sets of actors, set against the ingenious device of Jamal competing on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, where he is one question away from the grand prize of 20 million rupees, as he matches wits with the smarmy host, played by Indian film star Anil Kapoor. With the rest of the country enthralled at how this poverty-stricken youngster could possibly be in this position, Jamal is accused of cheating and hauled into the local police station to be interrogated (and tortured) by Irrfan Khan’s ultimately sympathetic inspector, revealing in flashback how he came to know the answers to each of the questions leading up to his big moment.

It’s an exhilarating journey, filled with Boyle’s patented kinetic approach, which owes kudos to cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who uses a variety of different styles to capture the colorful rush of images, editor Chris Dickens, production designer Mark Digby and music composer A.R. Rahman’s masterful mixing of modern Western pop from M.I.A. with a propulsive mix of Indian exotica, a sonic example of the world’s rapidly boiling cultural melting pot. All should be up for Oscar consideration.

While Slumdog Millionaire could be accused of audience manipulation, or even exploiting the country’s grinding poverty and exotic color, Boyle never allows tourism to get in the way of his classic novelistic narrative. This is the kind of hyper-romantic movie Hollywood doesn’t make anymore, but it’s one that never grows old, as timeless as the country where it takes place. This is a ragas-to-riches story for the new globalization, a sign that our individual cultures may be worlds apart, but the fervent dreams and desires that make us human are the same all over.