Slumdog Millionaire's Artful Dodge - Film Review
A Feel-Good Movie about Poverty, Greed, and Sectarian Hatred?
Feb 16, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire is a feel-good movie about poverty, greed, sectarian hatred, and brutality to children and women. Above all, it is a film about escape from all of the above: a protracted, visually stunning chase scene through the warrens of Mumbai’s slum ghetto. The film follows Jamal as he eludes his pursuers and, by overcoming one trial after another transforms into a young man, all the time clinging to a belief in his destiny.
Jamal’s transformation is paralleled by Bombay’s morphing into modern Mumbai, where new money pushes aside the ghetto’s corrugated tin hovels to make room for high-rise hotels. With new money comes yet more insidious criminals. New money also brings jobs, though one might wonder if any are better than the telephone solicitor sweat-shop where present-day Jamal works as a lowly chai-tea boy.
A Game of Chance
The central dramatic device of the movie is India TV’s version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, a game of chance and choices between plausible answers. The 20 million rupee question might be: Is it destiny or luck that allows Jamal win not only the millions, but the girl he feels is his destiny?
The quiz show host barely contains his contempt for this uneducated “wallah-tea-boy.” Suspecting someone must be feeding him answers, when the show breaks the host gets some of his police buddies to drag Jamal away for questioning under torture.
“How can a slumdog know the answers” the policeman asks. As Jamal tries to explain, a series of flashbacks, sometimes amusing, often horrific, show us how he learned answers along his own tortuous journey.
The beatings finally stop as the policeman, and the audience, become more and more intrigued by the story of Jamal and his older brother, Salim.
Escape, Part One
The boys’ first escape is from a horde of marauding men who attack the ghetto shouting anti-Muslim slogans, killing the boys’ mother and beating everyone they can lay hands on. The boys find temporary shelter in a sewer pipe. Over the objections of Salim, Jamal invites a young orphan girl, Latika, to throw in with them.
At one point, they are subsisting in a makeshift tent in the city dump when they are “rescued” by a man running an “orphanage” that profits from the children's street begging. This is no Fagan, though. He knows that a blind or one-legged orphan brings in the most money, and if they don’t come to him that way, well, he can arrange it. Unless the boys can escape.
Trains
Trains and train stations figure prominently in several of these episodes: Trains are a means of escape; train passengers have food to steal or might buy whatever the boys can scrounge to sell. The gorgeous Victorian train station in Mumbai stars as the place where Jamal hopes to reunite and escape with his lost love. (The departure platforms also provide the set for what has to be one of the most entertaining and, yes, feel-good film credits sequences.)
Diverging Paths
From the same mother, nurtured by most of the same harrowing experiencesl, Jamal and Salim follow different paths. The older brother is seduced down the path of money and power, employing his stolen gun in service of a local gangster, yet kneeling on his prayer rug to pray forgiveness before he goes out on a hit.
Is it destiny? Some will wrankle at the notion that there is some entity out there pulling the strings of destiny (who is either ignorant of suffering said string-pulling causes, misanthropic, or if sympathetic, botching the job badly). Nevertheless, the fact is that Jamal both believes in his destiny and repeatedly risks his life to make it a reality.
If Jamal had not lucked onto the quiz show, or if he had been asked questions he didn’t know from his horrific past, and if he did not win 20 million rupees, would Latika have chosen to stay with the gangster for whose pleasure Jamal’s brother procured her? Without money, she felt she had no choice.
Escape, Part Two
The studio audience for Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and millions more who watched on television from shops and slums, escape for an hour by identifying with and rooting for this most unlikely contestant, cheering deliriously each time he answers a question.
So too for us, the audience of Slumdog Millionaire, the real 20 million rupee question may be: Does the film make us feel good, and in doing so allow us to escape the reality of poverty, greed, sectarian hatred, and brutality to children and women?
Destiny, Chance or Choice?
Destiny? We can blame all their troubles on whatever “higher power” we imagine pulling the strings. Chance? We might chalk it up to their bad, very bad luck. Or choice? If we say the poor, the orphans, the battered women and children simply make bad choices that keep them where they are, must we not also ask ourselves whether we choose to ignore and perpetuate that reality or will we choose to find ways to act?
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