Review: Slumdog Millionaire

Why is everyone so enamoured with the turgid, slight, flawed romance of Slumdog Millionaire? The protagonist is largely inactive, devoid of empathy and seems incapable of anything but a bewildered glare. Satisfying character development is shelved in favour of cheap plays at the heartstrings with scenes of poverty and violence. Of course it is tragic that millions – nearing billions – of people, many of them children, live in abject poverty and squalor. But in a narrative sense, showing flashbacks of a child’s mother beaten to death or his friends deliberately maimed for begging does not actually explain his present day motivations or necessarily create a connection to the character. Bad things have happened but the guy is still a motivation-less dead fish on screen. Likewise we see how he knows these ‘impossible’ answers. But why he is so desperate to prove himself and why this girl is the answer to his happiness – what should be the driving questions of the film – are so hastily pasted into the clever tapestry of sights and sounds that they disappear into insignificance. (And no, “It is written” as a plot justification isn’t remotely strong enough to hold together a feature film. It is the cinematic equivalent of an eighth grade creative writing task hastily concluded with “Then I woke up”.)

The shambles that is the script is a crying shame for many reasons; Danny Boyle is a supremely talented director; the central story structure of showing through flashback how this poor boy circumstantially knows the answers to these questions is novel and interesting; and the child actors are compelling if raw talents. In the end the central character is uninteresting and the central romance is flat out disappointing. No mean feat for a character driven romance.

Other elements of the film were frustrating – the jarring motion-blur of the action sequences and the distractingly frenetic editing masking the plodding pace of the story to name a few. Still, these are personal aesthetic preferences rather than inditements on the movie as a whole.

But returning to the central frustration, why is this film so loved and lauded? Does it tap into Western guilt over the state of a former colony, offering an unthreatening, rise-against-the-odds protagonist to purge our discomfort? Do we so desperately need to believe that the people we indirectly oppress every day can be saved by a bit of determination streak of improbably luck? Are we willing to absolve the sins of the world in romanticism so easily? Slumdog Millionaire is a feelgood film, but given the chasm between its cinematic quality and its reception, I suspect it is feelgood for all the wrong reasons. Proceed with scepticism…