Financial Times, UK
A fairy tale of Mumbai
By Nigel Andrews
Published: January 7 2009 20:29 | Last updated: January 7 2009 20:29
Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle)
Watching Slumdog Millionaire is like being run over by a carnival. It is a colourful way to go, if you don't mind being cut short in your prime. But you cannot help thinking that back then – in your prime (an hour or a minute ago) – you were enjoying plain life and reality, while there is none of either in Danny Boyle's feelgood Mumbai tale. It explodes like a street festival, from the early scenes of scampering poverty and tragedy, filmed like demented out-takes from City of God, to the 20m rupee climax on an Indian television version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, whose previous questions, pinning the hero Jamal (Dev Patel) to his spotlit dreamtime, have been spaced through this multiple-flashback movie to structure and punctuate it.
Visually Boyle is on Trainspotting form, full of heady inventiveness. He deserved a script that matched his stylishness. But screenwriter Simon Full Monty Beaufoy, adapting Vikas Swarup's novel Q & A, has springcleaned it of credibility and substituted what could charitably be called a fairy tale. The point about a fairy tale, though, is that it has one far-fetched premise – the ignition key to its story – after which everything purrs logically from point to point. Here every scene is a wild whimsy, lashing the viewer on through wonder, joy, tears and every other strenuous, ersatz caprice in its weather system.
Each moment makes its point like a party piece, then passes on. The spirit of aspiration bursting up through poverty? That will be the scene of the pre-teen Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar, pictured above) staggering forth from a latrine-dunking to hustle a passing Bollywood superstar for his autograph. Love? That would be Latika, Jamal's childhood girlfriend, who grows up through three different performers until reaching the flower of womanly beauty (Freida Pinto). Ruthless Mumbai corruption? That would be the snarling pimp who enslaves her and also the cops who, startlingly, drag Jamal away from Millionaire's first recording session and torture – yes, torture – him to determine if he was cheating.
Don't worry about suspending disbelief: for an hour or so Boyle will do it for you. The film's visual panache is strong enough to ambush doubters, whose scepticism will stumble into hidden nets and be hoisted high into the firmament. You cannot not marvel at the bravura of early scenes, shot by cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (of The Last King of Scotland and the Danish Dogma masterworks) with furnace colours and thrilling camera movements. You cannot not warm to the child actors who make merry with their chance at fame, even while the movie's trauma tourism turns a city's social tragedy into a series of lollipop adventures.
Maybe only a critic will develop cynical fatigue at all, as the optimism marches on. But for me the game was up with, first, the assumption of the teenage Jamal's role by Dev Patel – a dolefully inexpressive young actor also handicapped by strikingly dissimilar features to the previous Jamals – and, second, with the rush-to-resolution of every subplot as time runs out and the audience threatens to turn back into a pumpkin. A post-Halloween pumpkin. For after sitting there for so long in a grinning glow of acquiescence, each facial response sliced into shape by clever cine-sculptors, the time will surely come when every thinking viewer decides he is being taken for an overgrown melon.
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges