Slumdog Millionaire Review— This Slum Dog is for the Foreigners!

January 24, 2009 at 6:59 am · Filed under movienomics ·Tagged amitabh bachchan scene in slumdog millionaire, anil kapoor slumdog millionaire, slumdog millionaire climax, slumdog millionaire hit, slumdog millionaire movie review, slumdog millionaire public talk, slumdog millionaire release in India, Slumdog Millionaire review, slums in slumdog millionaire

5:21pm, screen 1 at Prasadz multiplex, the show is about to begin in 9 minutes and I can’t wait to hear the music. Honestly, I didn’t care much for the film, but I wanted to hear the music from the guy whom I’ve adored since a child as he goes to the Oscars to see if his nominations turn in to awards. 4 Golden Globes, 10 Oscar nominations, Indian setting with mainstream Bollywood stars like Anil Kapoor, Irfan Khan…my expectations were sky high. Typically, award winning films don’t go down well with mainstream audience, like me, but Slumdog Millionaire is not that (bad) kind of awards-film; it wants to entertain. Yes, Slumdong Millionaire does deliver, but, personally, I feel the film appeals more to the foreign tourists who are fascinated by the unbelievable contrasts that India offers.

The story is about Jamal and his elder bossy brother Salim–from their childhood to adulthood. They live in the slums of Bombay and their hard events in life from getting an autograph of Amitabh Bachchan, losing their mother in Hindu-Muslim riots to the exploitative begging mafia teaches them some lessons. As a matter of sheer co-incidence, destiny, or luck when Jamal goes to participate in Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, the questions he gets asked have answers in his life’s events. He goes to win the show and the girl he loved unconditionally at the end. The story is simple, but it is the narration that captivates you (at least in the beginning). The film begins with grown-up young Jamal in jail being beaten to own up about how he knows all the answers as Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor) suspects he is cheating on his show and gets him arrested. Eventually, the inspector (Irfan Khan) gets convinced with his life-story and how he knew the answers and lets him to go answer the last question. This is not intellectual material here; just plain simple story with good narration that kinda gets stale in the second half as it is the same narration throughout the film—the game and the flashbacks in to Jamal’s life. The second half too is a little uninteresting as nothing new or elevating is shown. Nope, there are no twists here or surprise ending.

The first few scenes showing the slums and police chasing the slum kids with A R Rahman’s background music is nice. The first half offers several scenes that will be off great amusement for foreign tourists: the slums, the dhobi ghats, the fake tourist guides at Taj Mahal, the dirt, the shit, the filth, cramped schools, begging mafia, prostitution centers, trains and how the poor travel in them, the plight of slum kids, the work the slum kids do to earn a few pennies to eat a little and so on. The director has captured the condition of urban slums and the hand-to-mouth living that the masses of India do. It is realistic cinema in this matter because mainstream Bollywood is today focused only on foreign locales and beautiful studio sets. Yes, I agree, all Indians know that the majority of the country lives in poverty and we need not see it on screen every week; we are better off seeing the beautiful sets and locales. If you have to live in India, the rich and the poor must become insensitive to their surroundings. This is a fact of India.

The highlight scene: the community toilets in the urban slum which boasts of open top and open bottom with the shit depositing on the ground. The kid Jamal is shown shitting from top with the yellow ground (read shit) below (my wife closed her eyes and caught my hand unable to take this filth no more!). When Jamal’s door is locked, and Amitabh Bachchan gets off the helicopter, Jamal jumps down into the pool of shit, and runs with shit all over his body to get his star’s autograph. The film has a few of such interesting/amusing sequences, but other than that there is no message or nothing though provoking about the film. However, the idea of making a kid from the slums show up the game show and win a million is great!

As Prem Kumar the game show host, Anil Kapoor is good (looks old and jaded though) and so is Irfan Khan as the Inspector. Even Jamal is just ordinary. Come to think of it, the grown up Jamal doesn’t even look like a guy from the hard-life. The junior artists, the kids who constitute a majority of the film deliver a knock out performance. The love story track doesn’t make any sense and is not well developed so we can’t call this a love story either. The music is really good and for the international audience it is new and exciting. But we’ve heard this Rahman sound before, and you’ve heard even better background from ARR. The music didn’t blow my mind away. Jai Ho comes towards the end as the credits are rolling. The coexistence of filth and wealth in India as always fascinated foreigners and now with slum kids in the center stage the film must have caught the fancy of foreign critics. I honestly don’t know how the film got such critical acclaim. Perhaps, just like Jamal, the film too must just be lucky or it must be written (read destined) to get some awards. Towards the end, I was not as excited as I was before the film began.

Mr. Inkenti’s Movienomics Verdict: One Thumb Up. Interesting narration, but frankly there is nothing to go ga-ga over this film. You can surely watch it once if are curious to see what the whole critical acclaim is for or not for.

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