Slumdog slush

I’m amazed at all the praise for Slumdog Millionaire, which has just won four Golden Globes and is being touted as "the movie to beat at the Academy Awards". “Dickens with rupees” the Village Voice called it (what a brilliant turn of phrase); that’s almost as much of an insult to Dickens as this clichéd and daftly plotted movie is to India.

There are good, even great, elements to Slumdog Millionaire (although many of them seem to have been borrowed from the much better Brazilian slum movie, City of God). The colours and cinematography are wonderful and they blend seamless with the atmospheric score by A.R. Rahman (which deserved the Golden Globe it won this week). The final faux Bollywood routine over the credits is a funny and appropriate ending. The child actors are beguiling.

But that is far as I can go.

There is nothing to say about the evil stereotypes that litter the film—the wicked Fagin-like character who kidnaps the children, the fat and sadistic police torturer, the boorish gang boss—except that the film-makers obviously didn’t see creating characters as part of their remit, not if you can buy them all at a fire-sale of worn out Indian “types”.

And the plot! OK, leaps of faith are a feature of Indian cinema, but this story just makes no sense. The only advantage of having a quiz show contestant fortunate enough to be served up a diet of questions that all miraculously echo incidents in his own life is that this implausible device enables the film-makers to tell his hackneyed story is a series of flashbacks.

However, Jamal’s story has holes big enough to drive a Tata truck through. Isn’t it a bit curious that these slum kids speak to each other mainly in English? Why would the police torture a nationwide TV celebrity? How come whenever Jamal, the main character, tries to locate his beloved (bearing in mind that this is Bombay, a city of 15 million people), she miraculously appears? The kids fall off a train and guess what, they’re at the Taj Mahal.

Some of this, especially the Taj Mahal sequence, is presumably intended to inject dreamlike interludes into the grimness of the main story line, but you have to be very good to carry that off. Slumdog Millionaire’s improbabilities just diminish your belief in the already far-fetched plot.

Despite its efforts to make a statement on modern India, and the transition from the slum culture to the media culture, Slumdog Millionaire is an old fashioned film, designed to pander to Western viewers’ biases about the dirtiness and brutality of life in India. It’s a bummer, despite what them Golden Globes folks say about it.

Comments

[frayed]

Well, I still liked it despite its implausible/impossible plot. As a friend says, it was a fairy tale love story with evil characters and good characters. If you see it that way, then it is an enjoyable film to see. The storytelling was good, and as you said the music and filming of it were great.

(He says, she says -- haha)

[torn]

That’s true and I agree that it would be unrealistic to expect a fairy tale to have as watertight a plot as a regular drama (and after all, there are plenty of unbelievable events in Shakespeare).

Still, I don’t think the fact that you are writing a fairy tale frees you from a responsibility to create original and interesting characters. If Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm had just recycled clichés as this film did their works wouldn’t have been remembered as they are.

[M.H.A.]

Al -- My driver is M.I.A. so I'd thought I'd catch up on your blog. I'm relieved to finally find someone who finds the movie a bit problematic on plot and character. I've been the lone killjoy on most conversations about this movie. What bothered me most was how the movie seems to leave poverty in the past, when I think it is still very march a part of Mubai's present. To his interrogator's question, "How does a slumdog know whose face is on a dollar," Jamal says, "That's easy. Bombay became Mumbai." And the film cuts to a city of ever increasing high rises. The poverty is tucked in the past. Everybody's a gangsta now.

On an industry note, Hollywood guru teachers are always telling filmmakers in this part of the world -- you have fascinating sets, these slums. We don't see these everyday -- you must make films here! The problem is the filmmakers are sick of these sets. They live in them and pass them everyday. As artists they want to explore other topics. Very few go there, and if they do -- it doesn't take much to be celebrated.

[Frayed]

OK, ok I'm starting to sway to the other side and am seeing your points of view. After seeing "Waltz with Bashir",
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylzO9vbEpPg it's difficult to be as impressed with "Slumdog". Not that there is any need to compare but it drives the point that Slumdog M was not at all an accurate picture of reality. (hmm.. but then again does it have to be?)