Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
12/30/08
It's a odd experience around
this time each year to be informed that a coming pack of movies are the
best of the year and then to wait around for a month or two until getting
a chance to actually check them out for ourselves. Certainly this
tidal wave of hype helps to sell tickets; in fact, it makes hits of films
that could not otherwise hope to draw audiences in our hype-centered film
culture. But inevitably it also leads to some head-scratching when
we've been sold a movie that has no audience friendly attributes.
On the other hand, I'm left scratching my head over the critical response
to Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire for the opposite reason:
at its' best (particularly in its' pitch-perfect last 20 minutes) it's
sublime. At its' worst, it's as dull as it is perfunctory.
But it's never anything less than melodramatic, the kind of placing of
audience manipulation over dramatic integrity I'm always told is unworthy
of acclaim. Who knows, perhaps relocating these Dickensian cliches
to an unfamiliar part of the world made them feel fresh for some.
Most of Slumdog Millionaire didn't work for me, but it's hard to
argue with the proven crowd-pleasing formula of Who Wants to be a Millionaire,
and you've pretty much got to be made of stone not to be moved by that
rousing finish.
Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) is
being tortured by police, the Inspector (Irrfan Khan) and Sergeant Srinivas
(Saurabh Shukla), accused of fraud. The previous day, Jamal set India
on fire as the latest contestant on Who Wants to be a Millionaire,
hosted by the charming but combative Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor). Burning
through question after question, he made it to within one correct answer
of the top prize: but how could a lower-caste child of the slums
possibly know these answers? The officers are certain: he could
not. So they start a tape of the episode and he walks them, one answer
after another, how he came to know each fact, leading to flashbacks of
a hard life of unimaginable poverty. There are two constants in Jamal's
life (as he's played first by Ayush Mahesh Khedekar and then by Tanay Hemant
Chheda): his brother Salim (in escalating order of age Azharuddin
Mohammed Ismail, Ashutosh Lobo Gajwala and Madhur Mittal), who grabs at
any opportunity to rise out of poverty and into crime, and the search for
Latika (Rubiana Ali, Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar and Frieda Pinto), who he befriends
as a young girl and loves even as she becomes more and more the property
of those same criminal forces. The quiz show represents perhaps the
final chance Jamal will have to win her back, if only he can persuade the
officers to let him give his Final Answer.
Slumdog Millionaire clocks
in at two full hours, but much of what we see is just killing time.
While it is interesting to get a look at the magnitude of the poverty that
exists side-by-side with India's booming economy, the characters of Jamal,
Salim and Latika remain one-dimensional storybook puppets. Wind them
up and they'll be loyal, traitorous and idealized respectively in all situations,
and those situations become more and more stock the older they get.
Seriously, forget for a moment that the characters are Hindi, and tell
me that the scene where the adult Jamal impersonates a cook so he can visit
adult Latika in the home of the crime lord she's living with doesn't belong
on Dynasty or Mannix. Additionally, the True Love between
Jamal and Latika never rings true because the only extended time they spend
together is as prepubescent friends. After that, their paths cross
a couple of brief times, but when he says “I love you,” and she says “So
what?”, there's more truth to that than the movie wants to admit.
It's hard to really feel for the characters the way we're expected to because
Jamal's something of a doormat, loyal to a loser brother and pining away
for an unavailable woman for decades, and it would be unfair to ask the
actors playing all three characters as kids to elevate their material,
which they don't.
That Jamal's suffering is
so melodramatic and cutesy is a shame, because the idea of it all as the
karmic setup for his big chance to answer those seemingly random questions
(with a little help from his three lifelines) is an excellent one.
It just doesn't always play. As the flashbacks went on and on, I
kept wondering “Are you going to find the name of the guy who invented
the Revolver in here anywhere?” And while I liked the scenes in the
police station to a point, they also become slaves to the movie's structure,
as it's clear long before we get through all the questions that it's
fate, not cheating, that allows the Slumdog to get all the answers right,
but the Inspector keeps walking Jamal through them for no other reason
than to catch us up. Not to mention that the earlier questions aren't
exactly fraught with tension when the movie told us from the first frame
that he'd get them all right.
But somewhere around the
1:30 mark, we finally get down to business with the next-to-last question
and from there on, the movie is able to cast off its' wearying, Airport-meets-Godfather
flashbacks in favor of the stuff that's actually working. And from
this point on, the climax absolutely sings. It's great to watch Patel
grow in stature and confidence once Jamal sees the finish line in front
of him, while Kapoor is outstanding in the ever-more-complex role of Millionaire's
host. Freed from her criminal captivity at last, Pinto gives her
final scenes everything she's got to convince us that maybe this love is
meant to be after all, and Simon Beaufoy's script knows just how to milk
every last moment for maximum crowd-pleasing impact. And don't let
me catch anybody leaving before what may be the best end credits sequence
I've ever seen.
Thinking of which, I'd be
remiss not to point out something about Slumdog that is really revolutionary
and that's its' subtitles. In fact, the word “subtitles” doesn't
seem quite appropriate since they appear all over the screen, in the places
where we'd actually be looking rather than pulling us away from the actors
to the bottom of the screen, and backed by little transparent boxes color-coded
depending upon who's speaking. This is the subtitle equivalent of
Jolson singing, and I sincerely hope it catches on in other movies.
Because it sends you home
happy, I'd imagine that even those at odds with the bulk of Slumdog
Millionaire's running time won't be sorry they came. But I just
don't see the greatness of those first 90 minutes: to me, those flashbacks
seem to have escaped from the Hallmark Channel. Of course, the movie
currently ranks #89 on the Internet Movie Database's list of the 250 Greatest
Movies of All Time, so maybe I'm just the idiot. It is, after all,
just a spot ahead of No Country for Old
Men. |
