‘Slumdog Millionaire’ a rare gem, worth every rupee

Probably my favorite film of the year, “Slumdog Millionaire,” hit me like a ton of bricks. What marvelous alchemist brewed this heady, cinematic moonshine?


The answer is Manchester, England-born auteur Danny Boyle (“Trainspotting”). After making the trend-setting 2002 zombie movie “28 Days Later” and taking a sci-fi misstep with “Sunshine” (2007), Boyle has adapted Vikas Swarup’s acclaimed 2005 novel “Q&A.”


The resulting film, which I’m told veers from its source material, is bizarre, curry-colored, wildly sensuous and utterly captivating, a hybrid shot on location in the modern-day subcontinental boomtown of Mumbai.




Framed by scenes in which Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), a lowly chaiwalla (tea server), competes on the Indian “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” and featuring music by the incomparable A.R. Rahman, the film tells the story of Jamal and Latika (Freida Pinto), a parentless Romeo and Juliet. Orphaned street urchins, Jamal and Latika meet and fall in love while enduring hardship and peril at the hands of a grotesquely cruel descendant of “Oliver Twist’s ” Fagin. Years after their separation, Jamal still vows to be reunited with his beloved.


‘Slumdog Millionaire’ trailer (Story continues below)
Earlier, before the death of his mother in an anti-Muslim riot, Jamal (played as a younger boy by Ayush Mahesh Khedekar) leaps into a pool of excrement so he will not miss the chance to meet his movie-star idol. The scene is both a baptismal taste of what life has in store for the poor and a demonstration of his unusual resolve.


The riveting, rapturous, often terrifying story that follows is a “from-rags-to-Raja” tale, a Bollywoodized “Oliver Twist,” a Hindi “Orpheus and Eurydice” a modern-day “Three Musketeers” and a cinematic Taj Mahal all rolled into one.


About a third of the film is in Hindi with subtitles because of the talented, nonprofessional child actors cast in it.


The structure is ingenious. In between Jamal asking for lifelines and polling the audience are flashbacks to his childhood and scenes in which an angry police officer (Irfan Khan of “The Namesake”) interrogates him after the show.


“Slumdog Millionaire” asks us to believe that dreams can come true, that a beautiful flower can spring from a garbage heap and that a poor man can be made rich in the wink of an eye.


It’s an Anglo-Indian fairy tale worthy of Dickens or Disney. Boyle, co-director Loveleen Tandan, who handled the Hindi-speaking actors, and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (“The Full Monty”) have hit the proverbial jackpot. “Slumdog Millionaire” may be the 13-million-dollar baby that wins all the chips on Oscar night. You heard it here first, Dark Knight.


Courtesy:bostonherald.com