Movie review - Slumdog Millionaire

So I finally managed to watch this year's Best Picture Winner. So do I rate it like The Godfather (I & II!) or hate it like The Departed (okay I didn't hate The Departed but I don't think it was Best Picture worthy) or REALLY hate it like Shakespeare in Love? Anyway read on with abounding spoilers!

Jamal Malik is a child of the slums - a slumdog to use the vernacular. He is also one question away from winning 20 million rupees on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. Naturally, people are suspicious - after all, how does someone with minimal education manage to get that far in a general knowledge quiz? As the police question him somewhat forcefully, it turns out he knew most of the answers coincidentally through the various adventures he had in the slums and travelling around India with his brother Salim - because Jamal is fated to win the competition in order to get the girl of his dreams, childhood playmate Latika. I liked this story. For all it is, it's actually a sweet story about fated love but with more violence and less sugar.

The acting and direction in this movie was excellent. The ensemble award it got from the SAG was completely justified and deserving. I particularly liked the casting for Salim - each of those three actors were consistently excellent at showing him as more opportunistic and hardened than the dreamer brother Jamal. If I had a cast complaint it's that after junking a lot of Bollywood lead actors for being too good-looking, Freida Pinto is way too good-looking to be a slumchild! Her teeth are so straight and white! The direction could have made the love story mushier, thumped how poverty, crime, and lots of different things are bad mmkay, but instead of being a morality, it sticks to the love story, which is never a bad thing.

In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say something controversial. A lot of people told me that they found this movie absolutely harrowing with the scenes of the slum life, I didn't feel that while I was watching it. Maybe it's because the scenes are filtered through the perspectives of the kids but I didn't feel it was *terrible* - it just happens to be the conditions that they live in. Sure, I thought *I'm never going to India* but I didn't think *Oh. that's terrible!* That's not to say that I think people should live in such conditions but I think people look at it from a comfortable Western perspective and they can't believe such things happen. Well they do. Kids are maimed in order to be *better* beggars, rifling through garbage is a source of income, random violence happens, gangsters and prostitutes are present. My thoughts can be summed up by a line after Jamal and Salim orchestrate for the Merc of some American tourists to be stripped while the other takes them on a *tour* of the slums: 'You wanted to see the real India? This is the real India.' The real question of course is whether or not you think the use of the slum background helped the movie acquire the kudos it has garnered. Think about it - if this movie was set in a white-trash trailer park, it would probably be turned into a comedy, diluting the hard-life anecdotes, and critically treated with derision. But those are just my thoughts.

In anycase, I did find Slumdog is a sweet story of love, luck, and triumph over adversity backed up by some good acting. It was probably helped along by the extreme poverty setting but it certainly didn't hurt. I haven't seen the other best nominees but I can see why this won the big prize

7.5 - 8/10