Director Report Card: Danny Boyle (2008)

 

12. Slumdog Millionaire

This is right around the time I jumped off the Danny Boyle train. "Sunshine" disappointed me so much that I immediately became skeptical of his involvement in any other project. When his follow-up was announced, I can vividly recall narrowing my eyes and thinking "Oh, so it's a movie about "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?" Who cares about that?" A lot of people, it turns out. We all know now that "Slumdog Millionaire" would become a sleeper hit, grossing 375 million worldwide against a 15 million dollar budget, making it the biggest film of its director's career by a large margin. "Slumdog Millionaire's" success did not end there, as it also swept through most of the big award shows. The film's list of accolades include eight Oscars, seven BAFTAs, four Golden Globes, three Grammys, and plenty of others. This did nothing to dissuade my notion that Danny Boyle wasn't on my wavelength anymore. Though I like to think I've mostly outgrown my teenage contrarian attitudes, I'll admit this marks the first time I've actually sat down to watch "Slumdog Millionaire." 

Jamal has the chance of a lifetime. He is appearing on "Kaun Banega Crorepati," the Hindi version of "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?," and he's very close to winning the grand prize. He's so close that the show runners think he is cheating and Jamal is brutally interrogated by law enforcement. This is when he recounts the journey that has brought him to this place: Jamal and his brother Salim grew up in the slums of Mumbai. After the death of their mother, they fell in with a gangster who trains children to be beggars... Usually by crippling or wounding them, so their increasingly pathetic state will receive more hand-outs. There, they meet Latika, a young girl who also grew up in the slums. While escaping their master, Latika is separated from the boys. The brothers do whatever they can to survive but Jamal remains determined to find Latika. They discover her being prepared to be a prostitute, resulting in Salim murdering their former caretaker and pushing his brother away. Years later, Jamal works as a gopher in a call center, Salim is an errand man for a high-profile gangster, and Latika is now the kept woman of the same mobster. Jamal has worked to appear on the game show in hopes of contacting Latika and winning enough money to change their lives forever. 

The thread most connecting "Slumdog Millionaire" to Boyle's earlier work is its brutal depiction of poverty. You can find a line from the junk houses of "Trainspotting," the vagabonds of "Strumpet," and the post-apocalyptic wanderers of "28 Days Later" to the homeless kids here doing anything they can to survive. The film doesn't pull many punches. It starts by literally covering the protagonists, head to toe, in human feces. Somehow, this is only the beginning of the challenges the boy faces. That children are the focus of the first half of the film only makes these events more harrowing. In life under the poverty line, in the shadows of Mumbai, even little kids are another potential cash source to be exploited. Whether that's via prostitution or burning their eyes and breaking their arms to make them more effective beggars. The people who claim to want to protect and care for these kids are only manipulating them for a chance to make more money further down the line. Cash is the only thing that seems to matter to the majority of people in this world, Jamal being propelled by love making him an outlier in a thoroughly cynical world. 

"Slumdog Millionaire's" depiction of life as an unhoused child around the city formally known as Bombay attracted considerable controversy. This is a film partially made by Europeans about marginalized brown people in another country, bringing with it the expected subtext of othering different cultures and races in order to score points as a properly aware white person. This would make the film typical "misery porn," made by white storytellers for a white audience, about how bad those poor people have it in some far away place. A tokenized and simplified version of life in another country designed to make rich people thousands of miles away feel bad on the route to making themselves feel better. That Jamal speaks with a British accent in the latter half of the film also suggests an uncomfortable need to align the Anglo viewer with the dark skinned protagonist. Indian critics have accused "Slumdog Millionaire" of painting an overly negative depiction of India, some going so far as to call it an "anti-Indian film" or an assault on the country's self-esteem. These are obviously very serious accusations, not without foundation, that deserved to be considered. 

I'm merely a pasty-skinned dumb-ass on the internet and any contribution I could make to this debate is unneeded. However, it's not as if any of the things depicted in the film – child exploitation, prolific poverty, criminal empires – don't actually happen in Mumbai. "Slumdog Millionaire" does not depict India as a country without kindness, love, or joy. However, it does accurately reflect India as a country crippled by a caste system designed to keep the disadvantaged poor and the rich ever more powerful. Crime or falling into money is depicted as the only way to achieve true upward momentum on a culture that values currency more than it values people. If this is seen as an unfair criticism of Indian culture, then it must be an unfair criticism of places all over the world. It's not as if the film was made without an Indian perspective, as Loveleen Tanden receives a co-directing credit on the film. I'm far too dumb and white to contribute meaningfully to this conversation. I would say an outsider making observations on Indian culture is worthy of criticism but it would seem to me that most of the problems depicted here are very real and this is an honest handling of them.

As much as "Slumdog Millionaire" is a gritty drama about life on the streets, it is also paradoxically a fairy tale of sorts. This is designed to be the underdog-iest of underdog stories. By sinking Jamal into a pool of literal human excrement in the first act, our hero begins in about as low a situation as can be imagine. From this, he pulls himself up to being a literal millionaire. He escapes adversity and then learns to survive through his own wits. There's a sort of frantic, youthful energy to scenes of him and Salim riding the rails of a train way, stealing food and goods from the rich, that is delivered like a child enthusiastically telling an exaggerated story of their adventures. When he starts to con gullible tourists into believing he's a tour guide to the Taj Mahal, it has the impish feeling of getting away with something, pulling one over on the snobs. There's no doubt that actually living this life would be difficult, full of hardships, starvation, and misery. "Slumdog Millionaire" acknowledges that while also playing like someone joyfully recounting the misadventures of their younger days. 

In fact, that's exactly what "Slumdog Millionaire" is. The majority of the film is told in flashback, Jamal relating his story to the cops interrogating him or reflecting on past events while in the middle of the game. He recalls events with such specificity, the circumstances he has lived through leading so directly into the questions he is asked on the game show, that the movie comes dangerously close to feeling contrived or corny. There's a real “Dewey Cox has to think about his entire life before he plays” atmosphere to the way the film is structured. Human memory doesn't actually work like that and, on account of all of us being human hopefully, we all know this. You have to buy into the improbable likeliness of that set-up to enjoy "Slumdog Millionaire" or else you'll be incredulously shaking your head the entire time. This is why the film invokes that fairy tale like tone throughout most of its runtime. It allows for contrivances that would otherwise drop you right out of the reality of the story. 

And what would a fairy tale be without a princess? Throughout the life time of events "Slumdog Millionaire" depicts, it looks like Jamal and Latika meet only a handful of times as adults. One of those meetings includes him seeing her from a far-off distance, the woman waving at him. Over years, Jamal remains fixated on Latika, making it his life long mission to find her, rescue her from the situation she is in, and be with her forever. The film ends soundly on the note of "And they lived happily ever after." This premise never once addresses if Latika wants Jamal to "rescue" her from the life she has. If being the moll of a Bombay gangster is an existence she might actually have become accustomed to. In fact, the character is never given any sort of interior life at all. She exists exactly like a princess in a tower, a goal for the hero to work towards, a reward for triumphing. The script takes it as a given that the girl wants to be with the boy. She is an enshrined ideal, a perfect sweetheart, whose presumed life of affiliation with criminals is only passingly acknowledged. Latika remains oddly virginal for someone nearly sold into sexual slavery, untouched and unsullied like a prim princess in a children's tale is supposed to be. 

Like I said, "Slumdog Millionaire" is knowingly invoking this tone, allowing it to get away with tropes that might otherwise have been deemed problematic. We simply have to take the film on its word that Latika is a fully-formed human being who has understandable reasons for everything she does. I guess the kid you knew briefly in grade school who is suddenly a millionaire is probably the preferable choice over a grouchy crime boss, despite him kind of stalking you for a decade. That Boyle and his team can get away with this is because "Slumdog Millionaire" is partially a homage to the greatest format for improbable tales that has ever been devised: The motion picture. The character establishing moment for Jamal is when he wades through shit to get an autograph from Amitabh Bachchan, a beloved icon of Bollywood cinema. Stories shown from a projector or a television screen are depicted as whimsical escapes from the characters' harsh lives. It is the medium that ultimately provides Jamal an out from this hard life. I am woefully unfamiliar with Hindi cinema but, from my understanding, fantastical stories of heroes escaping adversity, brothers becoming enemies, strangely chaste romances, and random song-and-dance numbers are reoccurring tropes of this world. "Slumdog Millionaire" is clearly invoking these ideas in a self-aware way, most blatantly in the subplot of Salim's rise and fall within Mumbai's underworld. The movie makes the viewer wait the entire runtime for the dance number, that most expected of Bollywood cliches, and it acts as a much awaited exhale right before the credits role. Those who are familiar with India's national style of filmmaking primarily through cultural osmosis can still recognize the tools Boyle and Tandan are intentionally working with. (This also explains why the Academy loved the movie so much, as odes to the magic of the cinema are among their favorite topics.)

Ultimately, "Slumdog Millionaire" is using these ideas in service of a story about destiny. Though perhaps not from the angle you are expecting. Throughout Jamal's recollection of his life, he comes across events that very specifically prepare him for the questions he has to answer on the game show. Some of these function as quirks of happenstance, the answer he needing in that moment appearing as a minor background detail during a pivotal memory. Other times, they appear as acts of divine intervention, such as when a vision of Rama appears to him as a boy. It would be easy to assume that "Slumdog Millionaire" is telling a cheesy story about a protagonist who happens to have lived the exact correct circumstances to bring him to this moment. However, the retrospective aspect to the way the film is constructed gives me another reading instead. We are all results of the lives we have lived. The choices we make in the future are an accumulation of the events we have lived through, the people we've known, and what we've learned in the past. If you see "Slumdog Millionaire" as simply a fairy tale, Jamal gets his cash prize as his "Cinderella" reward for living through a shitty life. If taken as an pondering on the nature of life and fate, the film can be seen as showing us that each of us are constructed by everything that has come before us.

For all the interesting ideas inside the film, this easily could have still come across as a coy and overly calculated attempt at sentimental story telling, with a possibly patronizing tone towards another race. However, what I think truly holds "Slumdog Millionaire" together is Dev Patel's lead performance. As Jamal, he is a bundle of utter sincerity. You believe that he truly loves Lakita because Petal makes the guy seem so utterly enraptured by this woman he's only talked to a few times. The absolute sincerity Petal brings to the character makes him easy to root for. You want to see the guy succeed, against the adverse circumstances he's lived with. The entire movie truly belongs to Patel, as his youthful energy and charm keeps the viewer compelled during the more improbable narrative choices the film makes. When the final question, the climax of the story arrives, the look of dumbfounded luck on Patel's face goes a long way towards selling the emotion of not only that moment but the entire film.

This would mark Boyle's fifth collaboration with Anthony Dod Mantle, the director of photographer ultimately winning an Oscar for his work here. The gritty, digital style Mantle is known for, that be brought to "28 Days Later," is certainly present here. Much of "Slumdog Millionaire" is characterized by a dark and muddy approach. However, this is paired with some colorful visual exclamation points, pauses in the chaos that stand out. While I'm not the biggest fan of Mantle's cinematography, it is considerably enlivened by Chris Dickens' editing. Dickens previously worked on Edgar Wright's first two features and, funny enough, that high-energy style of cutting recalls the kinetic approach of Boyle's earlier films. This means, visually, "Slumdog Millionaire" represents a fusion between the approach that defined his earlier work and the digital graininess that had come to dominate his last few movies.

Having now seen “Slumdog Millionaire,” I think I can safely say that there were probably better movies released that year, that arguably deserved to sweep the Oscars more than this one. However, it's also not a bad movie. A strong leading man and an interesting approach to its material makes the film a pleasant enough watch. If this represents Boyle's shift from indie weirdo to mainstream crowd-pleaser, I suppose worst fates are possible for directors. The film will soon become a Broadway musical, proving that this certainly isn't the most forgotten of Best Picture winners from that decade, no matter how divisive it remains among the serious film fan crowd. Corny but energetic, calculated but sweet, “Slumdog Millionaire” does manage to entertain decently enough for the time you spend watching. [Grade: B]