Final Answer

Right now I’m kind of loving Slumdog
Millionaire, though I didn’t when I walked out of it. Immediately
post-credits, my reaction was mixed: As a frantic, decade-spanning
melodrama/romance/comedy that tries to be about
everything—poverty, money, fame, crime, the media,
politics, religion, sex, history, globalization, love—the latest
from director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later,
Sunshine) is nothing if not overwhelming.

Sometimes Slumdog feels crassly exploitative—like a
guilt-inducing parade of everything terrible that impoverished children
in peril have to endure—but often it’s nothing short of fucking
exhilarating, a pounding, pulsing, urgent rush that jumpstarts
endorphins and adrenalin. There are scenes of torture and abuse and
murder alongside giddy triumphs of comedy and heart (not to mention a
Bollywood-inspired dance number), and as Slumdog careens along
as both a harsh drama and a hammy crowd-pleaser, it’s tempting to write
it off as a bit of not-particularly-subtle manipulation. But
ultimately, one realizes that Boyle deeply cares about these
characters—and that sympathetic core is the reason why Slumdog
Millionaire is consistently, utterly, beautifully gripping. I
might’ve left Slumdog feeling a bit torn, but now, a few days
later, I can’t wait to see the thing again.

It begins with a bang: Teenager Jamal has been kicking some serious
ass on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? In
fact, he’s kicking a little too much ass: Despite being a lowly call
center worker who grew up in a Mumbai slum, Jamal is somehow getting
all of the show’s obscure questions right. As Jamal’s hauled in by
suspicious police for questioning, one detective wonders, “What the
hell can a slumdog actually know?” “The answers,” Jamal replies, and
then—via a series of flashbacks—we discover how he’s come
to know them.

Cutting back and forth in time, we learn how Jamal grew up with his
brother, Salim, in squalid, dangerous slums, and how the two found
Latika, a girl who Jamal’s been in love with ever since. We witness
Jamal playing, fleeing from a brutal pogrom, getting sucked into a
sordid stretch of slavery, and butting heads with Salim; as
Slumdog skips around the years, the film’s three main characters
are played by no fewer than three actors each. (The acting is excellent
across the board, but it’s most notable with the oldest versions of
Jamal, Latika, and Salim, played by Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, and Madhur
Mittal.) While Slumdog‘s narrative might be too fantastic to
ever be truly believable, it is, as one character dryly puts it,
“bizarrely plausible”—based on Vikas Swarup’s novel Q and
A (and adapted by The Full Monty screenwriter Simon
Beaufoy), Slumdog never feels totally real, but there’s always
enough intensely emotional truth to grasp onto.

The credit for how remarkably engaging Slumdog is goes to
Boyle, who’s at the top of his game. If Wes Anderson used The
Darjeeling Limited to make India look like a friendly, benignly
exotic Disneyland, Boyle uses Slumdog to do the
opposite—while never sacrificing the beauty of the country, his
film also never shies away from its danger, poverty, and ugliness. But
as frequently as the film is painful to watch, it’s a thrill to
experience: Deftly splicing together stunning colors, heartfelt
sentiment, and a brilliant, addictive, thumping score from Indian film
composer A.R. Rahman and M.I.A., Boyle nails a contagious sense of
euphoria that he hasn’t conveyed since the headiest moments of
Trainspotting. Somewhere amid the husks of India’s crumbling
ruins and shining new towers, and somewhere between Jamal’s desperate
bids for survival and his steadfast belief in love, Boyle tells a
familiar but gripping story—one that owes no small debt to
Cinderella, true, but also one that feels dramatic, modern,
rich, and vibrant in the ways that only the best cinema can.