The visionary fusion of cruel reality and enlightenment in Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire” deserved each of the eight Academy Awards the film won at this year’s Oscars. Boyle managed to feature Bollywood in a film accepted by the West helping it win Film of the Year instead of a one-way ticket straight to DVD.
Thanks to art houses in the U.S. and in England, the film gained recognition and seeped popularity through word of mouth, eventually landing premieres in major cinemas.
The film crawls through the garbage-filled gutters of Mumbai, India, tantalizing audiences’ imaginations with the smell of rotten fruit and the vulgar stench of poverty.
The difference between the depiction of slum life in India in “Slumdog Millionaire” and in World Vision commercials with starving barefoot children is the actors,’ devout submission into properly portraying poverty-stricken India, even those under the age of 10.
Eighteen-year-old Jamal (actor Dev Patel in his feature-film debut) has an unbecoming life as a call-center tea-server but finds his way out through the Indian version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.” Using his experiences and wits, he speeds through questions, earning more money with each correct answer, raising the hopes of audience members wanting to see him succeed.
But like any enticing film, his goal of winning the million is halted by those filled with rage, jealously and suspicion.
In an ebbing series of flashbacks throughout the film, audiences learn about significant people and events in Jamal’s life. The seamless flow between past and present life not only enhances the audience’s understanding of Jamal’s diligence to win the game show’s prize, it also simplifies the entire movie.
Often films fail to explain situations through frequent flashbacks, only causing more confusion for those in the audience, but the effortless success of scene transitions in “Slumdog Millionaire” bludgeons those who have tried before.
The painfully uplifting plot settled well in my heart instead of under my skin. The acting skills of Patel show his passion for being Jamal, but 8-year-old Ayush Mahesh Khedekar as young Jamal blind-sided audiences with the emotional attachment he submerged into his character as the scenes featuring his mother’s death are brushed with cruelty.
And as if actress Freida Pinto did not take enough breaths away with her stunning beauty, the emotion she put forth into being Latika, Jamal’s love, would make the emptiest of souls come alive.
The visually astonishing cinematography of Anthony Dod Mantle shows Jamal’s and the other children’s childhoods as orphans through highly charged images that reach into audiences’ hearts, pulling out emotions of sympathy and dread as they bounce with the orphans from one refuge to another while battling life along the way.
With a director that never fears ripping into the emotions of cast and audience members of his films, “Slumdog Millionaire” is nothing short of a fast-paced story line that takes audiences to the highest highs only to fall down to the lowest lows and then swoops back to the top.
To say this movie is a documentary would be incorrect, but to say it does not show the reality of India would be insulting. The movie is what it should be, an eye-opening experience into the life of Indian poverty and the struggle to be free from it.
The rounding out of picturesque acting, directing and sound track music makes “Slumdog Millionaire” a movie that lingers with audiences for life.