Slumdog Millionaire (***1/4)

A potentially cheesy rags-to-riches story becomes an urban folk tale in director Danny Boyle’s foray into the mean streets of Mumbai. Boyle has made films in a variety of genres, nearly all of them morality plays in one fashion or another. Best known are Trainspotting, a tale of heroin addiction, and 28 Days Later, the post-apocalyptic zombie hit. Here, he grafts the punky attitude and gritty urbanism of Trainspotting onto a quasi-fable reminiscent of Boyle’s 2004 Millions. Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, best known for a couple of other urban fables, The Full Monty and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, adapted an Indian novel.

British actor Dev Patel plays the lead role of Jamal, suspected of cheating on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, with all of the other roles filled by Indian actors. The childhood scenes of Jamal, his brother, and their female friend Latika are so natural that they anchor a fairly hoary plot later on. The children, non-professionals, speak Hindi with colored supertitles floating on screen. Jamal loses track of his childhood friend, but not his hope or lack of guile. The plot’s structured as flashbacks tied to the questions asked by a host who seems more like Simon Cowell than Regis Philbin. On the threshold of winning the 20 million rupee top prize, Jamal is interrogated because of the unlikeliness of an ill-educated teenager gathering the required knowledge. (In fact, the explanation is only partly convinving, but I went with it, discovering along the way my own ignorance of Indian culture.)

Almost as much of a character as Jamal is the incredibly diverse city of Mumbai (formerly Bombay). Frequently employing handheld digital cameras, Boyle infuses the film with the sounds and sights of this metropolis of 20 million, though never in a travelogue sort of way. A couple of cruel scenes, one involving a child, earned the film a probably unfair R rating in the US, but the tone is never pitiful, despite the great poverty (and intermittent violence) depicted. It’s a crowd pleaser, mostly in the best sense of the term.

IMDB link

viewed 11/19/08 [screening at Ritz 5]; reviewed 11/21/08