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 being blinded to increase his future earning potential as a beggar (and accepts that this is a fact of Indian life) and other, more conventional violence, naturally feels it’s been forced to confront tough material and so deserves its 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