This review originally appeared during the Telluride Film Festival. Slumdog Millionaire opens in select markets tomorrow.
Danny Boyle’s latest offering, Slumdog Millionaire, is generating a fair amount of buzz here at Telluride. Not unlike last year’s Juno, the film showed up in one of the mysterious TBA slots, delighting audiences made weary by a slate of good but somewhat depressing films, such as Hunger, Waltz with Bashir and Adam Resurrected. Slumdog Millionaire follows the story of Jamal Malik, an unlikely winner of India’s version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Jamal, his brother Samir, and fellow orphan Latika, manage to survive an almost absurd number of scrapes, the memory of each one coincidentally providing Jamal with answers to the game show questions. The film is big, fast, fun, and colorful, but ultimately a mess.
The hyperactive structure of the film is born out of the life experience-equals-game-show-answer formula. The first scene shows Jamal being tortured by police who suspect him of cheating, unable to believe that a “slumdog” orphan could know the answers to all those trivia questions. Jamal insists he really did know the answers, and the suddenly sympathetic cops disconnect the electrodes from his toes and decide to let him explain further as they watch a tape of the show. The one-two punch of crazy slum story providing an unlikely memory that later serves as a trivia answer becomes apparent very quickly, and never deviates through the entire film. This structure might have worked, but here it feels contrived and repetitive. The pace of the film is frantic, some of the flashbacks have comic merit, but by the third or fourth musical montage, it all feels too hectic and sloppy, especially considering the rigid and somewhat boring structure upon which the film is built.
People have been praising the performances in the film, and with the exception of the child actors and Bollywood veteran Anil Kapoor, I’m bewildered by this. Dev Patel’s Jamal is passable at best. He’s sympathetic, but most of the film he looks plainly dumbfounded at his own impossible luck. He gives us no real reason to care for him other than the fact that he’s a basically good person, and he’s in love.
The love story, seen by many to be central to the film, is sorely lacking. Jamal and Latika meet because they are both orphans, she’s first allowed to run with Jamal and Samir out of pity. The brothers loose track of Latika, only to later rescue her from forced prostitution. The would-be lovers are again pulled apart when Samir, who has turned to a life of crime, forces her to become a part of his crime lord’s harem. Jamal’s impetus for being on the game show, and his motivation to continue his stellar run, turns out to not be about money at all, but rather to get on TV in hopes that Latika, where ever she is, will see him. Sure enough, she does, and with the help of an inexplicably reformed Samir, she escapes the harem to find Jamal, her one true love. It’s the kind of shallow love story that plagues many Hollywood films.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a “love conquers all” philosophy propping up a film, but the whole thing collapses if that love doesn’t feel genuine. Freida Pinto as Latika, like Patel’s performance, is so-so at best. The film is too crowded and busy to allow any chemistry to build between these two. Sure, they’ve helped each other out of crazy situations, but just because a fireman saved my life doesn’t mean I’d want to marry him. When Jamal emphatically claims that being with Latika is their “destiny,” we’re forced to take his word for it.
Some will say that many of my issues with the film are due to the fact that I’m not seeing it as Boyle’s homage to Bollywood. While it’s true that the film is deeply indebted to the colorful and melodramatic musicals that are a mainstay of Indian culture, I don’t think the film holds up even under this reading. The key problem goes back to the lead actors’ performances. Great Bollywood players are not naturalistic by any means, they are exaggerated, playful, and incredibly charismatic. It seems like Boyle couldn’t decide which way he wanted Patel and Pinto to play it. Should they be overly theatrical to match the color and up-tempo editing? Or should they play it more realistically, two normal people brought together by extraordinary circumstances? In the end they do neither.
Slumdog Millionaire is not without merit. It’s nothing if not an ambitious film, and certain scenes do work well. But ultimately it’s an annoying cacophony atop a predictable structure.
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