FILMS
‘Slumdog Millionaire’ hits the jackpot
Reviewed by Rebecca Bostic | January 15, 2009 | The Catholic Sun
In 1998, the television game show phenomenon known as “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” first aired in Great Britain. The show, which quizzes contestants on their trivia knowledge for cash prizes, spread to 100 other countries, including India.
“Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight) uses the game show to tell the story about Jamal Malik, a poor boy growing up in the slums of Mumbai, India. The film focuses on his relationship with his brother Salim and his enduring love for another young orphan named Latika.
The film opens with Mumbai police torturing Jamal, played by Dev Patal. They are trying to get him to confess to cheating on India’s “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” Jamal has answered all but the final question — which he will get a chance to answer the following night.
The police assume that Jamal — a poor, uneducated young man — couldn’t have gotten this far in the show without breaking some rules. The film then recounts how Jamal — through his tragic, emotional and sometimes comical life — learned the answers.
Scenes from Jamal’s childhood and adolescence are cleverly spliced with the police interrogation and Jamal’s appearance on the show. The script, with a balance of heart-wrenching and heartwarming moments, is brilliant.
“Slumdog” successfully merges a moving story with excitement and entertainment in a way that is unparalleled in recent memory.
While the acting is great on all fronts — each of the three main characters has three actors portraying them at different ages — it is the direction by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan that produces a cohesive film that weaves together an otherwise dizzying number of storylines.
The life of Jamal, Salim and Latika borders on surreal in some flashbacks, where the camera shots are so beautiful the story enters further into the fairy tale genre, where it truly belongs. The modern fairy tale of Jamal and Latika is full of evil, laughter, danger, beauty and ultimately destiny.
Their love story was already written, as the film says, and the film’s direction moves this modern fairy tale away from cliché into a unique form of storytelling.
The story is the core. It follows Jamal and Salim Malik — as an adult played by Madhur Mittal — through their childhood as orphans in India. They befriend Latika — as an adult played by Frieda Pinto — whom Jamal spends the rest of his life trying to find.
The brothers beg, borrow and steal to survive, but eventually separate after Salim turns to violent crime. When they were together, the brothers relied on each other for survival. But after they separated, guilt and anger creates a seemingly unsurpassable chasm between them. They lost the community they created together.
“God wills the interdependence of creatures… no creature is self-sufficient. Creatures exist only in dependence on each other, to complete each other, in the service of each other,” according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (340).
When the characters in the film choose to help and support one another, life improves for all of them. It is when Salim continually chooses a selfish path of self-sufficiency that the entire group is hurt.
It is not often that a film comes along with such a perfect blend of beauty in both message and visual presentation. “Slumdog Millionaire” is a well-acted, directed and filmed movie, but abtove all, it tells a story that travels a spectrum of emotion and successfully explains a fairy tale that no one, especially the people of India watching a game show, were ready to believe.
“Slumdog Millionaire” will make a believer out of even the harshest skeptic.
Media critic Rebecca Bostic is a regular contributor to The Catholic Sun. Comments are welcome. Send e-mail to letters@catholicsun.org.
