As I eat my cake and drink my tea, reflecting on Danny Boyle's award winning film, I am struck by the amount of information that I remember from the first time that I saw Slumdog Millionaire in theaters in 2008. I remember scenes with such vivacity that watching some of them for a second time was almost unnecessary. The film has so much staying power that its impact has lasted years to the extent that certain images have remained in my memory perfectly intact. This is a film with such a strong voice, and such an unjaded artistic vision, that one cannot help but be moved to such a point that it cannot be forgotten. I simply can't imagine a movie that challenges one's conceptions of a time and a place that this has done with my ignorant thoughts of modern India.
Jamal is a young man one question away from earning 10 million rupees on the Indian equilvalent of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire". As a uneducated boy from the slums who serves chai tea to workers at a mobile phone company he is suspected of cheating, and is detained by the Indian police, for how possibly could a slumdog know questions that doctors and lawyers get wrong? An honest young man with an equally honest face, he suffers maltreatment and electrical torture until he agrees to go question by question explaining how he arrived at his answers. This is the foundation for a truly unusual method of story telling in which Jamal's life is presented with a series of flashbacks, each providing him with the necessary information needed to answer the game's questions correctly.
As we search for the answers, key moments in his life, such as the death of his mother, and the encounter of the love of his life as a child arevshown. The latter becomes something of the tie connecting the narrative together. The story of love which never gets to settle becomes the impetus for Jamal. He goes throughout his life, usually with his troubled older brother, searching for Latika (the eldest version of Latika, played by Freida Pinto has to be one of the most beautiful Indian women that I have ever seen) taking him from Mumbai to Bombay and back again. He suffers miseries beyond my lower upper-class, Western, Americanized brain's ability to understand, but he is steadfast, always searching for that one flicker of happiness that inevitably seems to elude him.
My ideas of India stretch from overpopulated squalor to technological wizardry. The Orient is an exotic curiosity to me, and this film both reaffirmed as well as challenged the ideas that I held about a place that I really know nothing about. Surely my assumptions will not be unique, and I therefore delight in a film like this which takes an unblinking look at the many aspects of a culture that is completely foreign to so many people while also taking the chance to celebrate life and love.
This film covers so many aspects of Indian culture from religious war to child slavery, and presents them with an intensity in its images that is stirring and shocking. Memories of a boy covered in human excrement with an autograph of an Indian t.v. personality, a child dressed as the god Rama, a singer being blinded--because blind beggars earn double--all haunted me for years after seeing the film originally, and viewing them again affirmed those lingering emotions. Danny Boyle, not out of a desire for viewers to pity India or feel bad about themselves, but simply out of a desire to paint a very real portrait of what a large chunk of over 1 billion do living day to day, has done what was evident his could do from his works like Trainspotting and 28 Days Later--he has created a work of genius.
It is up to the audience to decide what to take away from it, but it was clearly his goal to take one boy from tens of millions, examine his life with as much realism as could be allowed. But all is not bleak. In fact this movie is strangely hopeful. It wants its viewers to believe in Jamal and the idea that exceptional people need not necessarily be exceptionally smart, or talented, or privileged, or born in an industrialized Western nation. Sometimes they are simply exceptional because it is written, and that is an optimistic thought.
4/4
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