Old Yorker

  • Slumdog Millionaire

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Danny Boyle (2008)

    There are non-English passages in Slumdog Millionaire and the subtitles appear (a) on grounds of various colours and (b) in different positions on the screen.   I’m all for (a) in principle if it increases legibility but it occurred to me more than once here that the colour choice was meant to appeal to the eye of a graphic designer rather than of a reader.   I don’t like the idea of (b), which seems to make subtitles part of technique.  It’s mildly distracting in this case – it also epitomises Danny Boyle’s highly kinetic visual approach.   Slumdog isn’t just a motion picture:  it’s a perpetual motion picture.  At the start, there’s flashy (and unpleasant, because flashy is all it is) cross-cutting between scenes of Jamal Malik as a Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? contestant on Indian television and his torture by the Mumbai police who arrest him on suspicion of cheating his way to ten million rupees (with one question remaining between him and the top, twenty million prize).  At the end, the whole cast is involved in an exuberant dance finale over the closing credits.  It’s uncomfortable seeing India’s religious violence, and the country’s urban and rural poverty and squalor, used as elements of local colour but Danny Boyle puts on a very accomplished show.

    I imagine that Boyle decided to keep on the move (although the film, at exactly two hours, still feels on the long side) largely to stop himself thinking too much about the shameless screenplay by Simon Beaufoy (he also wrote The Full Monty), which is based on Q&A, a prize-winning novel by Vikas Swarup.   (Swarup is a diplomat, currently India’s Deputy High Commissioner to South Africa.)   Slumdog structures Jamal’s life story as a series of explanations of how he knows the answers to the sequence of questions he’s asked on the TV show.    This nifty plot is worked out in an assured, entirely mechanical way.   As a character study, the story is almost comically primitive.  The dramatis personae are:  two brothers (Jamal and the elder Salim) – the younger pure of heart, the elder drawn into a life of iniquity but ultimately compelled, by a filial bond, to do the right thing; the younger brother’s childhood sweetheart (Latika), used and abused by the corrupted elder brother and other, worse men but spiritually immaculate; and plenty of clear-cut baddies, whose nefarious behaviour is presented as in no way excused by the social conditions which have bred them (and who more or less get their just desserts).  After Salim and Jamal have been separated, as children, from Latika, Jamal is determined to find her again.   It’s not clear how the gentle Jamal persuades Salim to return to Mumbai for this purpose but Beaufoy isn’t interested in realistic motivation or explanation; it’s a matter of getting the characters in the right place for the next item on the agenda.  (Once he starts looking for Latika in Mumbai, Jamal appears to succeed in locating her in about five minutes.)

    I don’t admire the thinking behind this project but you can’t argue with how successfully it’s been executed.   The defects of Slumdog – in combination with its more positive strengths (including Boyle’s flair and the highly effective score by A R Rahman) – mostly work to its crowd-pleasing advantage.   The audience, because it has to watch scenes such as a child blinded to increase his future earning potential as a beggar and other, more conventional violence, naturally feels it’s been forced to confront tough material and so deserves a happy ending.  (The film’s climax – which Boyle brings off with breathtaking crude panache – demonstrates that love trumps money but Jamal wins the jackpot anyway, so no one is disappointed.)  Dev Patel as the young man Jamal and the paradisiacally lovely Freida Pinto as his sweetheart Latika are blankly appealing presences, utterly inexpressive.  (The children who play the younger versions of Jamal, Salim and Latika are all more vivid than the adults they become.  Madhur Mittal is the eventual Salim.)  If there were any reality or tension in these performances, it might obstruct the audience’s experiencing the characters in the simple way in which they’re conceived.  Even so, Dev Patel is inadequate to an extent that does weaken the effect of what Boyle is trying to do.  Patel doesn’t suggest a former street child (or a teaboy in the call centre where Jamal now works – a shrewd, screen-oriented updating of his job in the novel, as a waiter).  If anything, Patel gives the impression of someone lacking in native wit rather than uneducated.  It’s a familiar convention (in dramatisations of Dickens, for example) that an impoverished hero’s innate nobility is reflected in her or his refined looks and voice but it’s still a problem here:  Patel doesn’t convince you that, as a quiz show contestant, Jamal’s general knowledge would be limited to facts collected through personal experience.  And there are moments when Boyle needs Patel to be able to emote more than he can.  As the TV star host, Anil Kapoor has an unhelpful resemblance to Harry Enfield as Stavros (especially confusing since Stavros was part of the same vintage as Loadsamoney).

    The international aspects of Slumdog work for it too.  Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? (I assume in tandem with its signature tune – much in evidence here) is a worldwide brand yet the Slumdog story couldn’t be convincingly transposed to a big city setting in the West or Japan.  You can accept that, while still resenting the implication that the characters themselves are basic because of their situation.   Before I saw the film, I hadn’t realised that the source material was written by an Indian.   In view of who Vikas Swarup is, that may mean the approach is patronising rather than racist but it’s still offensive:  the geographical setting of the story or the social and material circumstances of the protagonist (or both) are used to justify characters whose simplicity of conception is from a bygone age.  Slumdog is an understandable and, in some ways, a welcome commercial and critical hit.  The film is emerging as the favourite to win this year’s Best Picture Oscar.  There have been many worse films to have done that but, if Slumdog does win, I can’t help thinking it will be for a cocktail of mainly bad reasons:  nostalgia for black-and-white morality; the film’s ability to celebrate the triumph of true love/virtue – in combination with making money/attaining celebrity; rewarding a ‘foreign’ (even occasionally a foreign language) work which features non-whites; a sympathy vote for the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai.  These factors, except for the last-mentioned, give an idea of the film’s smartness in appealing to different constituencies.   It’ll be interesting to see what Slumdog Millionaire looks like in a few years’ time but it’s triumphantly de nos jours.

    10 January 2009

  • Margaret Thatcher:  The Long Walk to Finchley (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Niall MacCormick (2008)

    The Long Walk to Finchley is described on Wikipedia as a drama and on IMDB as ‘Biography, Drama’.  The latter does acknowledge that it’s a ‘light-hearted retelling of the true story’ of Margaret Thatcher’s decade-long campaign to become a Member of Parliament – a campaign that eventually succeeded when she was elected the MP for Finchley at the 1959 General Election.   In fact, Tony Saint’s TV screenplay is nothing if not a comedy, and a broad one at that.  This is clear from the sarcastic title that ridicules the idea of comparison of this political leader with Nelson Mandela, and relies, as so many British writers before Tony Saint have relied, on the belittling effect of English place names.  IMDB’s ‘true story’ is questionable too, as Saint’s smug subtitle (‘How Maggie Might Have Done It’) makes clear.  Srdjan Kurpjek and Mario Takoushis’s jaunty music underlines the facetious spirit of the piece.   Margaret Thatcher first stood as a parliamentary candidate in the General Election of February 1950, in the safe Labour seat of Dartford.   This film doesn’t bother to explain how she was selected as a candidate there; in view of the difficulties she encounters in finding another constituency that will have her, this might seem a surprising omission – but that’s how shallow The Long Walk to Finchley is.   Although there’s reference to her studying for the bar, Mrs Thatcher’s qualifying as a barrister is glossed over when she briefly decides to give up any hope of a political career.  If she’s not going to the House of Commons, she’s destined to be a housewife.

    The comedy in The Long Walk to Finchley comes often in the form of jokes that rely on the viewer’s prior knowledge of Margaret Thatcher’s future incarnation as a cabinet minister and then prime minister.   Once we hear the aspiring politician stress a commitment to free milk for all British children, we can practically guess the geddit lines to follow.  On honeymoon with Denis, his new wife kicks up a noisy fuss because they’ve been overcharged by a French waiter.  ‘When will you ever go the jungle?’ Margaret’s infant son Mark asks his twin sister Carol, circa half a century before her triumph in I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!  In case you don’t pick this up, Mark then asks his mother if he can go to Africa one day and promises he won’t get lost there.  These jokes aren’t confined to the Thatchers – they extend to Edward Heath, although in a different and more personally unkind register.  Immediately suspicious of what he sees as Margaret Roberts’s uncompromising political ambition, the young Heath, to stress the importance of being a team-player in politics, uses the analogy of an orchestra but he’s seen by others, even in his early thirties, as a hopelessly confirmed bachelor and described, to his face, as preferring ‘to be alone with your organ’.  Once he becomes an MP in 1950, Margaret is encouraged to cultivate Ted as a political mentor.  He mistakes her clumsy flattery (‘With men like you thrusting forward …’) for a sexual approach and is terrified.

    It’s not surprising that most screen depictions of Margaret Thatcher to date have made fun of her.  Her influence on British life was large and largely destructive – if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.   As the reception of The Iron Lady three years on from this BBC film made clear, anything other than outright mockery of Thatcher is liable to be seen, in this country anyway, as contemptibly sympathetic towards her.  Although the jocose tone of The Long Walk to Finchley is very different from that of the confused Iron Lady, Tony Saint and the director Niall MacCormick hit the same problem that any account of Margaret Thatcher’s early political life is liable to hit:  the class and misogynist prejudices that she’s up against in the Tory establishment of the day, even when the grandee-chauvinists are as crudely caricatured as they mostly are here, are enraging enough for you to start rooting for her.  The film-makers try to get round this by having Margaret sometimes use her ‘feminine’ side to break through – she pretends to be tearful and strategically adjusts her skirt length and so on (see too the image on the DVD sleeve for The Long Walk to Finchley[1]).  I guess that Saint and MacCormick thought this would be effective because it makes fun of their protagonist as well as her antagonists but it still leaves you on the side of someone you feel you should be finding as loathsome as the real thing was.  It’s interesting too that suggesting, even for satirical effect, that Margaret Thatcher knew how to look good is enough to get an angry reaction in some parts of the British press.  In a Guardian article of June 2008 (‘Margaret Thatcher a style icon? Do me a favour’), Zoe Williams described the casting of Andrea Riseborough as Thatcher as ‘ludicrously flattering’ to the woman she was impersonating.

    Andrea Riseborough’s portrait is essentially a lampoon but she’s very witty.  In view of how much she has to say, it was probably a wise decision on Riseborough and Niall MacCormick’s part, because a relief for the audience, to give us a Margaret Thatcher more voice-trained than she may have been in the 1950s.  At first, the script is anxious to nail her lack of a sense of humour.  It always seemed to me that Mrs Thatcher was something worse:  she thought, mistakenly, that she did have a sense of humour, and Andrea Riseborough captures that well.  The way she tilts her head and looks pained at what an interlocutor is saying looks silly until you remember that Thatcher really was like this, at least by the time she was running the country.   Riseborough gets well-judged support from Rory Kinnear, who plays Denis rather sympathetically.  Samuel West has the decency to make Edward Heath, gnawed by political anxiety and emotional fearfulness, a substantially uncomfortable fellow.   Within the well-populated old boy networks of the Conservative Party, Oliver Ford Davis is amusing as the chairman of candidates and Geoffrey Palmer outstanding as John Crowder, the long-standing MP for Finchley whom Margaret Thatcher succeeded, virtually over Crowder’s dead body.  Palmer expresses Crowder’s reactionary misogyny as something seriously felt and meant – which gives impetus to Andrea Riseborough’s coruscating dressing-down of him, as the Finchley constituency party prepares to select its parliamentary candidate for the General Election of 1959.

    1 July 2015

    [1]  http://tinyurl.com/o7uv7q4

     

     

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