http://www.rogerebert.com/
The real India, supercharged with a plot as reliable and eternal as the hills. The film's surface is so dazzling that you hardly realize how traditional it is underneath. But it's the buried structure that pulls us through the story like a big engine on a short train.
By the real India, I don't mean an unblinking documentary like Louis Malle's "Calcutta" or the recent "Born Into Brothels." I mean the real India of social levels that seem to be separated by centuries. What do people think of when they think of India? On the one hand, Mother Teresa, "Salaam Bombay!" and the wretched of the earth. On the other, the "Masterpiece Theater"-style images of "A Passage to India," "Gandhi" and "The Jewel in the Crown."
The India of Mother Teresa still exists. Because it is side-by-side with the new India, it is easily seen. People living in the streets. A woman crawling from a cardboard box. Men bathing at a fire hydrant. Men relieving themselves by the roadside. You stand on one side of the Hooghly River, a branch of the Ganges that runs through Kolkuta, and your friend tells you, "On the other bank millions of people live without a single sewer line."
On the other hand, the world's largest middle class, mostly lower-middle, but all the more admirable. The India of "Monsoon Wedding." Millionaires. Mercedes-Benzes and Audis. Traffic like Demo Derby. Luxury condos. Exploding education. A booming computer segment. A fountain of medical professionals. Some of the most exciting modern English literature. A Bollywood to rival Hollywood.
"Slumdog Millionaire" bridges these two Indias by cutting between a world of poverty and the Indian version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire." It tells the story of an orphan from the slums of Mumbai who is born into a brutal existence. A petty thief, impostor and survivor, mired in dire poverty, he improvises his way up through the world and remembers everything he has learned.
His name is Jamel (played as a teenager by Dev Patel). He is Oliver Twist. High-spirited and defiant in the worst of times, he survives. He scrapes out a living at the Taj Mahal, which he did not know about but discovers by being thrown off a train. He pretends to be a guide, invents "facts" out of thin air, advises tourists to remove their shoes and then steals them. He finds a bit part in the Mumbai underworld, and even falls in idealized romantic love, that most elusive of conditions for a slumdog.
His life until he's 20 is told in flashbacks intercut with his appearance as a quiz show contestant. Pitched as a slumdog, he supplies the correct answer to question after question and becomes a national hero. The flashbacks show why he knows the answers. He doesn't volunteer this information. It is beaten out of him by the show's security staff. They are sure he must be cheating.
The film uses dazzling cinematography, breathless editing, driving music and headlong momentum to explode with narrative force, stirring in a romance at the same time. For Danny Boyle, it is a personal triumph. He combines the suspense of a game show with the vision and energy of "City of God" and never stops sprinting.
When I saw "Slumdog Millionaire" at Toronto, I was witnessing a phenomenon: dramatic proof that a movie is about how it tells itself. I walked out of the theater and flatly predicted it would win the Audience Award. Seven days later, it did. And that it could land a best picture Oscar nomination. We will see. It is one of those miraculous entertainments that achieves its immediate goals and keeps climbing toward a higher summit.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
It's getting ridiculous. Danny Boyle's film Slumdog Millionaire is now so popular that it is even difficult to book a place on a "slum tour" of Mumbai. That's where concerned westerners get the opportunity to visit a glorious city of contradictions and see the real slumdogs of India. They witness the horrific conditions, the dreadful poverty and the heart-warming optimism of these wonderful little boys and girls making the most of the cards life has dealt them.
These are the film's real-life heroes, who have propelled Boyle and his team towards the prospect of phenomenal success at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles in February.
Since its release, every cliché has been rolled out for the plight of these impoverished street dwellers, which is apt. This is first and foremost a film of clichés.
As well as 10 Oscar nominations, the production has had an enviably small amount of criticism. Rave reviews in India have, of course, been tempered with a discussion about why the West should feel able to portray, let alone profit, from a film about a purported vision of a "real India". But no one person or group has the image rights over an entire nation.
There has also been a slow reaction to the film's success in the West: witness the recent predictable stories about how the children in the film were underpaid, a criticism that taps into notions of western paternalism and guilt.
There's no doubt some critics of the film have their own agenda. With heated competition for Oscar glory, and in the cynical world of marketing, it is clear that it is the competition, in the shape of other films, which stand to benefit most from the negative press.
But such concerns are to be expected with anything that gets so much limelight. Where Slumdog really fails is not in social commentary but in its own art form. Boyle directs a film that is just not convincing.
Is the British public really so unaware of how the rest of the world lives to take this as an eye-opening tale of poverty in India? The film's success suggests that they seem willing to suspend their critical faculties. The story told through an episode of the Indian Who wants to be a Millionaire? (confirming it as one of the most annoying quiz programmes of all time) becomes more implausible with every question answered.
The characters are a selection of half-drawn stereotypes, barely sketched notions of criminals and slumdogs far removed from the complexities and heartbreaks of real life. As the hero miraculously transforms from dark rascal of the slums to charming and light-skinnedchaiwalla (tea server) in a call centre, we are treated to the idea that everyone in India is a criminal, a fool, a saint or a convenient mix of all three.
Boyle simply tries to tick as many boxes as possible. He wants an Indian version of City of God, another cult product. He wants an uplifting story about the spirit of the gutsy Indian people: they live in slums but still smile and believe in love. And, most obviously, he wants to include a touch of Bollywood, that most fantastical and shallow of genres. But it's not difficult to draw a visual spectacle out of a city that prides itself on colour and noise.
Switch on a documentary, watch the news or just flick through a guidebook and the vision of a spectacular country changing rapidly and beyond the grasp of its inhabitants is evident. The main issue isn't that the film is just patronising to India, but to the audience. It is merely a pastiche of styles and ideas, although ethnicity and epic landscapes may be enough to satisfy the Academy judges.
Maybe we should be realistic: if the slum tours profit, so do the charities supporting them. So the film has done some good. But that isn't the same as it being any good.
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