Film review

  • 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

  • The Misfits

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Huston (1961)

    An expedition by the principal characters into the Nevada Desert, to capture then sell wild mustangs, is at the heart of The Misfits.  The mustangs are described by the aging cowboy Gay Langland (Clark Gable) as ‘misfit horses’ and the trio trying to round them up are misfits too – or, perhaps, ‘ex-fits’:  Gay and his friend Perce Howland (Montgomery Clift) have been left behind by the decline of cowboy culture; Gay’s other friend Guido (Eli Wallach), who piloted a fighter plane in World War II, is stuck in a job as a car mechanic in Reno.  The attempted roping of the mustangs is the most arresting part of, and makes for a powerful climax to, John Huston’s film.  This is partly because of the stark beauty of the monochrome images created by Huston and his cameraman Russell Metty – the dark horses and the men struggling with them in the white expanse of desert.  It’s also because the episode is shocking, at least to a twenty-first century viewer who expects that no-animals-were-harmed in the making of a film.  These horses are visibly and audibly frightened.

    There’s a kind of correspondence between this upsetting evidence of the horses’ distress and the reality of what was happening, or about to happen, to the stars of the picture.   Clark Gable, who insisted on doing some of his own, physically demanding stunts, suffered a heart attack two days after filming ended in early November 1960 and was dead within a fortnight:  The Misfits was released on what would have been his sixtieth birthday.  Montgomery Clift was already in a bad way when he made this film, although he had two more important performances still ahead of him (in Judgment at Nuremberg and Freud) before he died, aged forty-five, in 1966.  The fourth member of the group in the Nevada Desert, the one woman accompanying the three men, is the recently divorced Roslyn Taber.  She is played by Marilyn Monroe, whose marriage to Arthur Miller, who wrote The Misfits, was disintegrating as shooting began.  Monroe died in August 1962 and this was her last completed film.  Thank goodness for the compensating biography of Eli Wallach, who survived to be ninety-eight (he died in 2014) and whose marriage to Anne Jackson lasted sixty-six years.

    It’s to these off-screen facts of life and death that The Misfits owes its, by now, mythic status.  John Huston, as quoted by Gerald Pratley in The Cinema of John Huston (1977), saw the characters in Arthur Miller’s story as:

    ‘… the holdouts, as it were, against the stamped-out, factory-made article.  The ones who were in revolt against this movement, but who didn’t know it themselves, were pursued and harried and put-down the way the horses were …’

    Miller’s writing of these people, however, is characteristically (that is to say unintentionally) condescending; and their – or their creator’s – verboseness sounds ridiculous in the vastness of the desert landscape.  The misfits are small and pitiable, or would be if the screen personalities interpreting them didn’t make them bigger.  (Miller’s treatment of his dramatis personae is more exposed in the performance of Eli Wallach, a good actor but not a star, and in minor characters like Thelma Ritter’s Isabelle Steers, who disappears abruptly and conveniently from the story – so that Isabelle isn’t involved in the desert expedition.)   The presence of Monroe, Gable and Clift – what they mean to the viewer through other performances and from what we know, or think we know, about their own lives – gives The Misfits an unarguable heft.  There’s a pent-up pressure under Miller’s words and the performances that draws you in.  Alex North’s ambitious, impassioned score expresses something of this, even if it feels too big for the actual story on the screen.

    Marilyn Monroe seems wan and preoccupied in her early scenes.   According to Huston, ‘sometimes she would hardly know where she was’, let alone know her lines, and the sequence in which Isabelle is coaching Roslyn on what she needs to say at her upcoming divorce hearing is particularly painful to watch.  As Roslyn starts to enjoy life with Gay and Guido, Monroe seems more with it – although it’s hard to tell if this is thanks to Huston’s clever shaping in the editing room.  There’s a particular moment – Roslyn repeatedly jumps from a step outside Gay’s house and back up again – where the actress, as well as the character, looks to be really enjoying herself.  Although one doesn’t associate Clark Gable with Westerns (you can count on the fingers of one hand the number listed in his Wikipedia filmography), his magnitude as a Hollywood star is enough to make his superannuated cowboy Gay Langland seem iconic.  Gable didn’t have great range as an actor but his wary quality here is compelling.  Montgomery Clift is a surprisingly introspective choice to play a rodeo performer (albeit an unsuccessful one) but he’s appealingly different from the other men in the story – you can understand why Roslyn is, for a time, drawn to him.  Clift’s playing of Perce’s phone call to his mother, in his first scene in the film, is the finest piece of acting in The Misfits.

    25 June 2015

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