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Movie reveiw: Slumdog Millionaire
BY MAGGIE SCOTT
Before the city of Mumbai was recent front page news around the world thanks to bloody terrorist attacks, India’s teeming metropolis (formerly known as Bombay) played a major part in the international acclaim for the Danny Boyle film, Slumdog Millionaire.
Certain to reap multiple Oscar nominations, this Toronto Film Festival Audience Award-winner is an exultant achievement in cinematic storytelling. Multi-layered and multi-structured, the plot radiates out from the central suspense of a game show contest down thematic paths of coming-of-age; sibling loyalty and strife; eternal love; a city’s transformation; sacrifice; and unyielding character.
In the journey of Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), his love Latika (Freida Pinto) and Jamal’s brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) writer Simon Beaufoy and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle powerfully and matter-of-factly depict conditions of poverty, exploitation and survival.
The “musketeer” brothers grow tough and clever in the vast dog-eat-dog destitution of Mumbai’s slums after losing their mother in an attack by Hindus on their Muslim enclave. As the “elder,” Salim insists on being the boss over the next several years.
His arrogant dominance will separate Jamal from his love-at-first-sight friend, Latika, whom Jamal wanted to make the “third musketeer” and took briefly under his wing. Vowing he will find her again, Jamal grows into young manhood with a strong sense of destiny, an arsenal of street smarts and the fortitude to reject Salim’s embrace of the dark side.
Eventually, Jamal finds Latika, but fails to extricate her from a demeaning and violent relationship with one of more corrupt movers and shakers in Mumbai’s wealthy economic transformation.
Hoping she will come to him when she sees him as a contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Jamal becomes a sensation to the show’s rabid fans as he ticks off right answer after right answer, until he faces the twenty million rupees question, “What is the name of the third Musketeer?”
Up until the night he gives his “final answer,” Jamal’s story has unfolded in flashback at a police station where the Inspector (Irrfan Khan) has tried to bully and torture Jamal into confessing that he has cheated. Will love and values prevail?
Transcending its foreign culture with a universality that would make Frank Capra proud, this is full of nerve-tingling victories of the human spirit. A Fox Searchlight release, rated R for violence, disturbing images, language.
