Slumdog Millionaire: A Review

This weekend I gave in to the hype and saw the movie Slumdog Millionaire. I entered the movie theater prepared only with the lowest of expectations. And so I was only mildly disappointed. The film has obvious and broad appeal as the quintessential underdog story, and while the cinematography succeeded in capturing something true about the texture of urban India, and the child actors were fabulous, the movie on the whole was just downright silly. (I might warn of plot spoilers ahead, but the movie is so devoid of surprises that there's no need.)

There has been a certain amount of criticism from Indian audiences clamoring (predictably) that the film Slumdog Millionaire fails in the way of all popular Western media, depicting only India's filth and poverty. But I don't see this as it's failing. After all, filth and poverty are undeniably part of the reality of India, and there's nothing wrong with situating a story there, as Mira Nair creditably did in her breakout film Salaam Bombay! In fact, the lives of the destitute, as any who live in extreme conditions or on the frayed edges of bare survival, provide fertile fields for real drama and deep inquisitions into the human condition, and there's no reason why they shouldn't be reaped as such, in much the same way as we regularly do stories situated in Europe during WWII and the Holocaust or the Antebellum South.

But even with the richest ingredients to select from, the storyteller can choose to whip up something fine and substantial, or to make cotton candy: sweet, light, and fun in the moment, but empty and ultimately unsatisfying (plus, eating it hastens tooth rot). And that's what Danny Boyle has done with this well-intended, hackneyed, feel-good flick. Now I've been known to enjoy my cotton candy as well as anyone—even to crave it on occasion—but what baffles me are the critical accolades this film is receiving from every corner. After winning four Golden Globes and literally dozens of of film festival and other international film awards and nominations, it's now considered by some to be the front runner for the Oscars.

Slumdog has its moments, to be sure. Like almost any Bollywood flick, this one too lurches between moments of pathos and bathos, flashes of insight and ingenuity engulfed the next instant by kitsch. But equally like most Bollywood flicks, the problems with Slumdog come down to dishonest storytelling: Veering away from human complexity and difficult truths to replace them with kitsch or stereotype; resorting to gratuitous displays of unwarranted emotion, violence, chase scenes, plot twists, and whatnot to tease, pull, or otherwise manipulate a response from the audience. Characters are uni-dimensional, with true blue heroes who are incorrigibly good, and bad guys who are horrifically bad. Moral "dilemmas" are conveniently black and white, so heroes and villains never need suffer a crisis of conscience—except, of course, when that villain is the hero's darker brother, in which case he is allowed a final change of heart, just before he dies, preferably in a hail of bullets. "Heroines" are absolute non-entities with a single character and role, which is to remain dolled up and precious, and finally to serve as the hero's grand prize at the end.

With two hours to hold onto us, Slumdog Millionaire managed to pack in every one of these devices. And on top of that, it suffered from bad acting, notably on the part of lead actor Dev Patel. Poor Patel was plainly not up to this role. I was even willing to accept that these uneducated slumdwellers spoke passable English, if only for the purpose of making an English-language film. But Patel's British accent and body language never for a moment allowed me to believe that he was acquainted with the life of the slums. He didn't even try. But, it gets worse....

Take for example, the early scenes of torture by electric shock suffered by our hero, Jamal, accused of cheating on a game show and served up to the brutal cops by the game show host, himself. Tortured for cheating on a game show? How can we not think that the cops in Bombay surely had a long list of lowlifes to torture ahead of this guy, tantalizingly poor and powerless though he may be? More than that, the very idea that the creepy host of the game show (adeptly played, for what it was, by Anil Kapoor) is trying to bring him down runs counter to everything known about game shows: They want people to win! They want underdog contestants who make good because it boosts their ratings! Neither the contrivance of torture scenes nor the evil game show host is even necessary to give this story drama, and yet half the film revolves around this hysterical disingenuity. Why?

And what about the scenes in which our hero gets chased first by cops and then by murderous Hindu mobs, yet in which no one is humanized, no sense, context, or motive is ever offered? Or the scene in which young Jamal literally dives into a pool of shit out of devotion to his film star hero, Amitabh Bachchan, running up to get his autograph while literally dripping with shit? Even in the loss of Jamal's mother, the violence, chaos, and need in the lives of the slumdwellers is depicted generically. While these events are in themselves not incredible (except getting Bachchan's autograph), they are strung together here without integrity, only to effect a whirlwind of sensational drama without scope or purpose except to whip up our fear, disgust, sympathy without enriching our understanding or deepening the characters.

Salim, the darker (and therefore, of course, darker skinned) brother who goes bad is also a stock character. Although his degeneracy is adroitly projected by both the middle and older actors of his part, the question never arises why? Why does he suddenly pull out a gun one day? Where did he get it? (India is not the USA: guns are not so easy to come by.) And more mysteriously, why does he later change his mind about who he is, one fine day? His exit scene, in which he buries himself in a bathtub full of money and awaits his death in a final blaze of machismo is taken straight from the annals of film kitsch. Not a bit of it made sense. All these characters are used as props, rather than being projections of humanity allowed to inhabit their own stories.

It doesn't matter, though. Ours is not to wonder why, is it? Ours is merely to be lifted into the world of wishful thinking, where the good guy always gets the pretty gal (and the riches) and we get to see the bad guys die. No matter how improbable, no matter how untrue to life. The only thing to do is to dumbly accept the filmmakers' conceit that "it is written."

What does work to great effect in Slumdog is its texture: the graininess of the film's finish, the quick-cut editing, the evocation of scale, as in the aerial views of the slums, the countryside from the top of a train, the teeming humanity of Bombay, which give the film a kind of hideous beauty. The most powerful images in the film are of the slums and the cities, their labyrinthine corridors and weathered facades. It's in the way the visual is used, sliced, and textured that the film almost transcends its pedestrian story and exposes an earthiness, a vital reality behind the flaccid distractions of its characters. Unfortunately, this isn't enough to make up for its flaws.

But it looks like Slumdog may be a trendsetter of sorts. Now everyone wants in on that Bollywood magic, from Johnny Depp to Will Smith. Who knew that all mainstream Bollywood needs to do to cash in big box office returns and critical praise in the US is to make their films in English and take out the dance numbers? Hardly surprising that kitsch would have universal appeal.

Comments

[Ruchira]

Usha:

Couldn't agree with you more. My husband and I got conned into seeing this utterly mediocre and predictable film by the surrounding hoopla. For all the reasons you have so ably articulated, we were disappointed - to say the least. But the film is a hit even among non-Indian Americans.

Dev Patel's sophistication and polished manners indeed made him an unconvincing Slumdog. He is very cute though. Perhaps the next time he will be cast in a more appropriate role.

[Micheal Yager]

brilliant review of the movie. your insight is awesome.

[Usha]

Yeah, actually, the more I think about the movie, the worse it gets. Did anybody else think it strange that Latika's gangster boyfriend comes home and demands that she make him a sandwich: white bread, mayo, cold cuts, lettuce? How hard would it have been to get that right?

Another surprising factoid about this film is that Freida Pinto, who played the adult Latika, has now been signed on by Hollywood's most prestigious casting agency. In her some 15 minutes of actual screen time, filling a bland, throwaway role for which the greatest challenge would have been to keep the lipstick from smearing her teeth, she's somehow come to be regarded as a major star and great actress. How does this happen?

Ah. Perhaps it is written....

[Juliekaye]

I agree - this film was not worth the Oscar nominations. I didn't know much about it except the name before I went, and I'm sorry I didn't read your review before I went, or I would have chosen another film. I spent most of the movie horrified by the squalor and the violence and the cruelty, and nothing in the story did much to make sense of any of it or make me care much about the characters as adults. It wasn't at all what I was expecting, and it left a sour taste in my mouth. Not brilliant, not even all that good, except that it did show me in very grainy and gritty detail a side of India I had not seen in such detail before.

[Namita]

I think there are two issues here. The first is the film itself -- and I couldn't agree more with you Usha. The film explores every cliche that it runs like a modern India 101, complete with religious riots, children being maimed in order to beg etc.
The second issue is the right of a film-maker to portray a less than rosy light on India. I thought the general lack of furore (compare this with the outrage over City of Joy, and perhaps with the exception of Amitabh Bachchan's cribbing on his blog, though he now seems to have retracted) was a good sign, showing maturity and confidence in ourselves as a culture.
I'm amazed, however, that the critics have given the film upwards of 4 stars! What's the bet that apart from a small multiplex crowd, Slumdog will do terrible business in India?

[Usha]

Hi Namita,

It's true that the uproar from India might have been louder even just a few years ago. And I, too, find it heartening that Indians do seem to feel increasingly confident with regard to this issue. I sincerely hope this is the case.

But I wonder why you think the film won't do well in India. Other than the fact that English is a stumbling block (it will need to be dubbed or subtitled for a wider release outside the multiplexes), and that some Indians are offended by its focus on Indian poverty, there's little in it that wouldn't appeal to an Indian audience.

I think it's true that if the images of poverty in this film aren't unbearably shocking to you (which they won't be to most Indians), then you can't avoid the flimsiness of its plot and inauthenticity of its characterizations. Those could be reasons why Indians won't like the film. But then, flimsy plots, cardboard characters, and bathos are expected and embraced by fans of Bollywood, so I wonder why they wouldn't love the same in this movie, too?

On the other hand, flimsy stories can be more palatable if they are told with appropriate whimsy, levity, or fantasy. Perhaps that's what makes some Bollywood films a bit more enjoyable than this one is: to its credit, Bollywood rarely takes itself quite so seriously. I just don't see what Danny Boyle was doing by telling such a ridiculous, shallow, and emotionally inauthentic tale with such bludgeoning seriousness.

It's possible that this inappropriate seriousness will be the film's undoing in India. But the wider audiences there aren't really likely to notice this kind of thing. It will be interesting to see how it does, if it's not too hampered by the language barrier.

[Namita]

Actually, there is a Hindi version of SDM (Slumdog Crorepati) which released simultaneously. Why it won't do well outside the multi-plexes? Just a gut feeling -- while audiences might identify with the flimsy plot and the formulaic underdog makes good and gets the girl too -- it has none of the masala of a Bollywood flick. No song and dance (except for the last scene), no heaving bosoms and grinding hips, no recognisable star cast (except for Anil Kapoor).
I don't know Usha, I could be wrong...

[ghanji]

the movie was simply amazing, it did focus on the bad parts of movie, but its a movie its not a f-ing documentry that will show every class in the society it focused on a particular class in society. the slow and rather unfocused person who made this letter needs to go see the movie and again and wonder why it has won so many awards across the industry.
the movie was beautiful and yes in real life bad people dont survive to long and good people do mostly have the last laugh..

[justpassingthrough]

Lighten up, people! The movie is simply a fable about two brothers and a girl, not a treatise on Indian culture. I thought it was beautifully done and I believe its success is due to the fact that its core emotions about the bonds of love, and about hope, trust, and survival are universal. In fact, in some ways it reminded me of a Charles Dickens novel.

I hope it wins the Oscar for Best Picture.

[Sumant Rawat]

Agree with justpassingthrough,the ostensibly Indian comments expose another underbelly....hypersensitivity and absence of irony.Like the irony and preposterousness of a man called Barak Hussain Obama becoming the 44th president of the United States this movie works which
maybe annoying to the literal minded..but it WORKS!

[Namit]

Salman Rushdie rips into Slumdog Millionaire in this article:

What can one say about Slumdog Millionaire, adapted from the novel Q&A by the Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup and directed by Danny Boyleand Loveleen Tandan, which won eight Oscars, including best picture? A feelgood movie about the dreadful Bombay slums, an opulently photographed movie about extreme poverty, a romantic, Bollywoodised look at the harsh, unromantic underbelly of India - well - it feels good, right? And, just to clinch it, there's a nifty Bollywood dance sequence at the end. (Actually, it's an amazingly second-rate dance sequence even by Bollywood's standards, but never mind.) It's probably pointless to go up against such a popular film, but let me try.

The problems begin with the work being adapted. Swarup's novel is a corny potboiler, with a plot that defies belief: a boy from the slums somehow manages to get on to the hit Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and answers all his questions correctly because the random accidents of his life have, in a series of outrageous coincidences, given him the information he needs, and are conveniently asked in the order that allows his flashbacks to occur in chronological sequence. This is a patently ridiculous conceit, the kind of fantasy writing that gives fantasy writing a bad name. It is a plot device faithfully preserved by the film-makers, and lies at the heart of the weirdly renamed Slumdog Millionaire. As a result the film, too, beggars belief.

It used to be the case that western movies about India were about blonde women arriving there to find, almost at once, a maharajah to fall in love with, the supply of such maharajahs being apparently endless and specially provided for English or American blondes; or they were about European women accusing non-maharajah Indians of rape, perhaps because they were so indignant at having being approached by a non-maharajah; or they were about dashing white men galloping about the colonies firing pistols and unsheathing sabres, to varying effect. Now that sort of exoticism has lost its appeal; people want, instead, enough grit and violence to convince themselves that what they are seeing is authentic; but it's still tourism. If the earlier films were raj tourism, maharajah-tourism, then we, today, have slum tourism instead. In an interview conducted at the Telluride film festival last autumn, Boyle, when asked why he had chosen a project so different from his usual material, answered that he had never been to India and knew nothing about it, so he thought this project was a great opportunity. Listening to him, I imagined an Indian film director making a movie about New York low-life and saying that he had done so because he knew nothing about New York and had indeed never been there. He would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion. But for a first world director to say that about the third world is considered praiseworthy, an indication of his artistic daring. The double standards of post-colonial attitudes have not yet wholly faded away.

[Usha]

Rushdie says it better than I did.

And even better is his last point, which speaks volumes more:

In an interview conducted at the Telluride film festival last autumn, Boyle, when asked why he had chosen a project so different from his usual material, answered that he had never been to India and knew nothing about it, so he thought this project was a great opportunity. Listening to him, I imagined an Indian film director making a movie about New York low-life and saying that he had done so because he knew nothing about New York and had indeed never been there. He would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion. But for a first world director to say that about the third world is considered praiseworthy, an indication of his artistic daring. The double standards of post-colonial attitudes have not yet wholly faded away.

[S. R.]

Your review said everything that I felt about the movie. It is nice to see that there are still people who keep their critical faculties alive amidst all the hoopla going on.

[astrokid.nj]

Usha,
I am coming late to the party, having discovered this site only recently, but am loving its articles. And I must say I like your review.

It doesn't matter, though. Ours is not to wonder why, is it? Ours is merely to be lifted into the world of wishful thinking, where the good guy always gets the pretty gal (and the riches) and we get to see the bad guys die. No matter how improbable, no matter how untrue to life. The only thing to do is to dumbly accept the filmmakers' conceit that "it is written."

What you say above is true for the vast majority of desi movies, and thats pretty much the reason I dont watch them anymore (for all practical purposes). Its kinda like I need to leave my brain back home. I just cant relate to much of the storytelling (there are a few exceptions though.. Hazaaron Khwaishen Aisi). The Song and Dance sequences baffle me. Who does that in real life??

I am actually surprised that the content of the movie didnt receive much greater attention than the movie-making itself. Meaning.. the injustice and darkness portrayed, if true, didnt cause a furore for reform? for e.g blinding children?? How can we as a people allow that to happen? Or as R.K.Narayan said, is it a case of "India will go on"?