"Slumdog Millionaire" contains the seven basic Hollywood plots and then some - the Road Trip, the Quest, Confronting the Monster, Tragedy, Comedy, Rebirth, and Rags to Riches - a melange difficult to pull off, though the last movie to try this stunt, "Star Wars," did just fine.
The first images are immediate, what Marshal McLuhan would call hot. A poor but personable young man, Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), has wrangled himself onto the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." The game show sequences (in English) are intercut with another (in Hindi) in which poor Jamal is being tortured by the local police. Apparently, Jamal has won a great deal of money and some mucky-muck with connections thinks Jamal is cheating, so it falls to an ultimately sympathetic police inspector (Irrfan Khan) to beat a confession out of him. Jamal was barely schooled in an impossibly crowded classroom, getting most of his education on the streets. "Doctors, lawyers, never get past 60 thousand rupees," the inspector explains. "I just answered the questions," Jamal replies.
Realizing he has taken the torture too far, the inspector (who would rather be catching rapists and murderers) relents enough for Jamal to take him through each answer, flashing back to his heartbreaking childhood amid the crushing poverty of Mumbai's slums. But 6-year-old Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar) and his loutish older brother, Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail), regard the garbage and the filth and millions of plastic grocery bags abandoned and backwatered in their brightly-painted shadow city as a playground worthy of J. M. Barrie's Lost Boys.
Young Jamal is optimistic. Young Salim a bit of a scoundrel. Jamal, eager to get the autograph of a famous Bollywood actor, is using one of the most seriously decrepit outhouses I've ever seen; the enclosure is held above a riverbank by rickety wooden scaffolding, the toilet being a square in the filthy floor through which human waste is deposited below. Just as the actor choppers into the neighborhood, Salim locks Jamal in the outhouse, for meanness as much as anything else. Desperate to get the actor's autograph, Jamal holds his hero's photograph high enough to clear the muck and drops through the hole. Covered in excrement, Jamal gets the autograph. A hollow victory as his brother later steals the photo and sells it. Nevertheless, it is how Jamal knows the answer to the first question, "Who was the star in the 1973 hit film 'Sanjeer'?"
The intercuts between future and past explain how the boys become orphans, how they connect with a third child, a lovely little girl, Latika (Rubiana Ali), whose disappearance in the first act becomes the issue of Jamal's own haunting quest in the second and third. And, least significantly perhaps, the linear retelling of Jamal's boyhood explains how Jamal manages to know the answer to nearly every question the game show host poses, a character played with oily malevolence by Anil Kapoor.
For wannabe imitators who will be lining up to copy this film's structure (and there will be a mare's nest of them), a few notes: Flashbacks rarely work unless the A story or B story is huge, and the final reveal completely unexpected (think the final image in "Citizen Kane"), though young filmmakers keep returning to the same tired cliches. Not to worry. The A and B stories in "Slumdog" are both significant, fortunate keynotes factored nicely from Vikas Swarup's original novel, "Q & A," adapted by screenwriter Simon Beaufoy ("The Full Monty"), and stitched together beautifully by director Danny Boyle ("Trainspotting," "The Beach," "28 Days Later").
Nine actors play each of the three protagonists at three stages of their lives, a neat trick that had me scratching my head as to how they did it until I consulted the IMDb for the full skinny. The youngest, tweenage and adult Jamal are played by newcomers Khedekar, Tanay Chheda and Patel; Salim is portrayed by Ismail, Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala and the slightly more experienced actor Madhur Mittal; and Latika is played by Ali, Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar and Frieda Pinto, all in debut roles. Indeed, the child actors were so perfectly cast (credit co-director Loveleen Tandan) that I couldn't readily tell when the six-year-olds ended and the tweeners began.
Now a warning. For purists (like me) who want their filmgoing experience to be undiluted and non-disclosed, here be spoilers.
For starters, you might block out the title with your hand because it gives away the ending. "Slumdog" might as well be titled "Poor But Deserving Boy from the Slum Wins a Million Dollars." Okay. I gave it away. But that's what happens. Blame the marquee.
Second, there are points when the film becomes very dark indeed. Much too dark for children below the age of eight. If you detest major spoilers, you might want to skip the next paragraph.
The three slum urchins, Jamal, Salim and Latika are rescued from living in a garbage dump by a seemingly benign orphanage supervisor, Maman (Ankur Vikal). That many of the orphanage's children are missing arms and legs seems to further redeem the super, though his business is to send them begging in the streets of Mumbai. (Girls with "Babies earn double. Crying babies earn twice double.") Maman selects Jamal and another boy for their pleasant singing voices, and makes the pugnacious Salim a camp enforcer. One humid night, Maman bids Salim bring to him the singing boy to a rickety shack at the orphanages' edge. Then he signals a henchman to anesthetize the child with a dirty rag soaked in ether. Once knocked out, Maman sets the limp child on a dark table and brings a steaming spoon to the primitive operating theatre, at which point the camera thankfully turns away. The operation, registered by Salim's horrified expression, is rendered all the more horrifying by the silence in which it takes place, and by the tenderness with which the super covers the boy's eyes with a soiled and bloody rag. Maman has severed the boy's retinas with a spoon. "Blind singers earn double, too," he explains to Salim. It's clear now that Maman's been maiming the children to increase the value of their spoils. Then he tells Salim, "Now go fetch your brother."
Far from saying too much, those who've already seen the movie would attest that I've barely said anything about it at all, such is the complexity and depth of "Slumdog's" simple story.
Credit should go to everyone for the success of a film that took only $15 million to make (a pittance in the movie world). The editing is brisk (editor Chris Dickens), the music peppy and exotic (composer A. R. Rahman), but what really stood out in my mind as the muscularity of the cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle ("The Last King of Scotland," "28 Days Later"). During one early chase sequence, the camera pulls back to reveal the rusty corrugated rooftops of Dharavi, the slum in "Slumdog," like the random cubes in a city-sized canvas from Picasso's blue period. For a cinematographer, the eye is everything, and this movie capitalizes on it, well past grossing twice its cost.
I contend that great stories should encompass their own complete moral universe; where the good are redeemed, the wicked punished, the victims vindicated, and the deserving rewarded. Add one dram to it, and it could become pompous and overwrought. Take one bit away, and it might turn shallow and irrelevant. "Slumdog" makes the effort to please my criterion, even coming in at a few seconds past an exact 120 minute running time.
Be mindful that "Slumdog Millionaire" is not exactly a feelgood experience. But neither were "Midnight Cowboy," "Platoon," "Schindler's List," "Million Dollar Baby" and "Crash," other films, beautiful to look at, but dwelling in worlds that most of us (knock on wood) will never be unfortunate enough to experience for ourselves.
Nevertheless, "Slumdog Millionaire" is so rare a gem that it might even be forgiven the giddy Bollywood musical number that girdles the closing credits like an MTV video on a lavish budget. It's a beautiful film portraying a misery zone not for the kids and not for its R-rating (it deserved a PG-13) that has more in common with the five movies cited in the previous graph. They all won Oscars for best picture. The lock is on.