When British direct or Danny Boyle hits his mark, no matter the genre, hardly anyone moves a story better. That is surely the case with Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, the dazzling, if predictable, tale of an teenaged slum kid who by wild fluke ends up on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Not in a long while has a foreign film from anywhere gotten such praise—and it comes via Bollywood at that, and with a Brit director to boot. But does Slumdog boil down to little more than a cinematic hustle, pulled off by the exhilarating finesse of a “blithely glib entertainer” (as one critic put it)? Or might this be a story worth telling, made the more so by Boyle’s stylistic pizzazz?
Such questions have dogged the still-young Boyle (all of 52) from the beginnings of what is now an estimable film career. From the very start, he has walked the line, bending and pushing tired genres, infusing the worn-and-weary with style, storytelling panache, and more than a little thematic bravado. Boyle’s first film, Shallow Grave (1996), did a macabre comic turn on a bunch of nasty yuppie roommates who dispose of a new roomie’s body (an overdose) to keep his unforeseen bag of cash. Style over substance, said critics. Enticing and bold but, like its title, shallow. Mordant, perhaps, but—given its gore and its crass, unpleasant characters—why bother?
So too with the instantly infamous Trainspotting (1996), an antic, scabrous romp on heroin addiction told, for once, from the inside out. The film is based on a popular Irvine Welsh novel (and then a stage play) about a bunch of Glasgow laddies whose favorite diversion, when not scrambling for dope, is watching trains. So much for Rob Roy and sweet Robbie Burns. Catching both the bliss and bane of “H,” Trainspotting‘s ambidexterity rather awed viewers. Still, something about that premise—that we should suffer these blithe, amoral dimwits—annoys the moralist in us all. So savvy a critic as Janet Maslin in The New York Times, much irritated with herself, found the film “perversely irresistible” because of its rambunctious, “inexcusable merriment” in point of view (the film is guided by a voice-over narration by the main character). Nonetheless, she went away irked that we should be asked to care at all about these solipsistic sluggards, especially since any caring we do muster proceeds from Boyle’s improperly “gleeful” storytelling. Or might this apology for doping really be “incendiary daring,” as Rolling Stone reviewer Peter Travers celebrated?
Boyle can and does stumble—mightily. The verve that made Shallow Grave and Trainspotting worth watching, no matter how annoying, pretty much disappeared in Boyle’s attempts to go mega-mainstream. First came The Beach (2000), a desert island romance cum Lord of the Flies starring Leonardo DiCaprio (his first role since Titanic, for a mere $20 million). Like DiCaprio as an actor, and the character he plays, the film aspires to both the pretty and portentous—and, as that odd pairing suggests, badly muddles whatever it’s after.
The same vague weightiness characterizes a more recent big-budget venture, Sunshine (2007), an arduous sci-fi adventure in which planet Earth sends another crew—the first having disappeared—to re-ignite the dying Sun. Like The Beach, the film plays with notions of Light, though that proves ironic, for darkness triumphs—sort of, maybe, or does it? The sets are lovely, the visual scheme stunning, but, forsooth, in behalf of what? The film echoes masters of the visionary space tale—Tarkovsky, Kubrick, and even Spielberg—but never remotely coalesces into an intelligible thematic something. Maybe LA Times reviewer Kenneth Turan got it right in calling Boyle’s work both “glib and facile,” the most that can be expected from a filmmaker not up to a sensible look at anything very serious.
Well, maybe, and maybe not. After all, Boyle followed The Beach with the remarkably assured apocalyptic zombie story 28 Days Later (2002), in which PETA activists blithely free a bio-engineered virus that—a mere 20 seconds after infection—turns normal folks into raging, blood-crazed monsters before they in turn die a gruesome, horrifying death. The film is plenty chilling and brutal, though in the end, given what people can do, maybe zombies are not so bad after all. At the same time, strangely, much is poignant as Boyle steadily laments the frailty of life and civilization. This note of mourning first comes in the churchy-ethereal sound track, starting with a faintly heard “Abide with Me” as the protagonist, awakening from a long coma, finds London empty and decimated. And, without embarrassment, the story treats what makes life meaningful. There is new maturity, says A. O. Scott, and even a kind of “curious sweetness.”
Simply put, (fairy) tales as disparate as Rocky and Slumdog play to the soul’s deep thirst for repair of some small slice of the world’s incalculable woe.
That hint of sweetness goes full-blown in Millions (2004), a film that is both “life-affirming” and “spiritual,” as Boyle himself put it. That it is, and then some, a bright, antic, dead-serious telling of a seven-year-old’s visions of the saints he loves and whose lives he studies. In fact, Boyle pushed screenwriter Frank Cottrell to amplify those saints and visions. Throughout Boyle is pitch-perfect, providing much visual wit to lighten what could have gone cloyingly gooey really fast. For one, he takes the boy’s visions matter-of-factly, just as M. Night Shyamalan treats the kid who sees dead people in The Sixth Sense (1999) or, more apropos, the one who wants to find God in Wide Awake (1998), to which this film has more than a little kinship. In both a young boy thirsts to know a dead parent is okay; in Millions, young Damian (Alex Etel) has the added problem of figuring out what to do with millions in cash, a gift that has seemingly dropped out of the sky; given his religious bent, he thinks it’s from God, for “who else would have that kind of money”? In any case, the film is funny, bracing, and hopeful, a tale of deep human thirst that finds a lovely sort of this-worldly fruition.
Which brings us to Slumdog Millionaire. The film fairly rips along, telling its story with remarkable cinematic virtuosity, Boyle’s camera off-kilter, floating, dipping, soaring, the entire production assembled and scored with meticulous, dizzying skill. Much viewer pleasure lies in simply riding the sensuous wave of its unfolding. Ten minutes in we can guess how it will all end, the premise laid out plain, an ingenious plot device borrowed from Vikas Swarup’s potboiler novel (whose cultural voyeurism resembles the turgid melodrama of The Kite-Runner). If anything, knowing how it will all turn out gives leave to enjoy the ride, not caring a whit about plausibility.
Slumdog is, after all, another underdog rags-to-riches tale (he gets the sweetheart, too), this time set in sprawling Mumbai, a swarming mass of unexpectedly nasty humanity. And the film shows it all—vast slums and pervasive ruthless gangsterism. (Whether in fact this is hearty realism or a kind of exotic pandering is open to debate.) As a motherless slum kid, hero Jamal Malik (played by three actors but mostly the adult Dev Patel) seems an unlikely hero, let alone a quiz-show winner, for he’s stone ignorant of the learning of proper civilization. Given conditions, the wonder is that he and brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) have survived so well so long. So certain are the powers that be that this slum kid couldn’t know the answers to those arcane quiz show questions, they instruct the police to torture him to find out how he’s cheating. And this brutal “inquiry” initiates the flashbacks that tell the tale. For young Jamal (he’s about twenty), it’s all “destiny,” an explanatory staple in Bollywood theology. And so it might be, or so we end up hoping, at least for a little while, and we’re glad for any possibility that beats the odds that keep everyone stuck. That’s axiomatic in movies, especially American ones, and in politics too, apparently.
Exhilarating and infectious, Slumdog swept the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Golden Globe Awards: picture, screenplay, director, and score. And it is no wonder, really. Humankind seems a patsy for this sort of thing, no matter how much conscience and brain tell us to prefer high-minded, and usually dire, realism. Simply put, (fairy) tales as disparate as Rocky and Slumdog play to another part of the self—the soul’s deep thirst for repair of some small slice of the world’s incalculable woe. Fair enough.
Roy Anker is professor of English at Calvin College. He is the author of Catching Light: Looking for God in the Movies (Eerdmans).
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