Quiz Show Quester

The Mumbai in which the embattled romantic young hero of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire maneuvers to survive and follow his dream of love isn’t the city in which 10 or so terrorists from neighboring Pakistan wrought terror and death late last month. Their deadly rampage was through some of the city’s high-rent neighborhoods and pricey venues where tourists and the international corporate executive set gather with India’s new burgeoning bourgeoisie.

Dev Patel in Slumdog Millionaire

Jamal (Dev Patel), the movie’s 18-year-old protagonist, comes from another Mubai (Bombay): the teeming, seething, filthy slums where his fantastic adventures begin and lead him through hell and high water to an appearance on the Hindi version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

We first encounter Jamal when he’s already well up the climb toward the TV quiz show’s last question, and the immense reward for a correct answer. Actually, we find him bound to a chair and being very nastily and rather painfully interrogated by a police officer who resembles a blowzy Buddha and Jabba the Hutt.

It’s Jamal’s question-answering prowess that has landed him in this plight. He’s suspected of cheating. How else could a lowly-among-the-low chaiwalla (tea boy) in a call center know enough to advance so far into the available prize money? The unctuously condescending and sarcastic game show host (Anil Kapoor) certainly doesn’t believe he’s for real.

How Jamal came to this precarious pass forms the movie’s boisterously busy, backflashing narrative. Brutally orphaned early on in one of India’s periodic outbreaks of religious strife, Jamal and his resourceful older brother, Salim (Madhur Mittal—each boy is played by three successively older actors), become increasing adept at survival, even, eventually, earning their way with a variety of scams and dodges. On their way, they link up with a similarly orphaned girl, Latika (Freida Pinto), an attachment that becomes a deep and painful yearning for Jamal. (The more cynically amoral Salim only uses her, like almost everyone else.) Jamal’s separation from her, and his years-long quest to reunite with her, become the core, redemptive motivation of his young life.

Boyle’s exuberantly, often wildly episodic movie swings from one bustling dramatic panorama to another, from one intense sequence to the next. He and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle make modern India an enhanced, vividly detailed presence throughout. Boyle’s previous movies (e.g., Transpotting, Sunshine) have relied on visual and dramatic hype and on narrative shock treatments, but his approach is under better creative control in this one. He uses the screen frame for sweeping, mobile compositions and kaleidoscopically complex effects.

Slumdog’s picaresque personal odyssey suggests the filmmakers have looked at Henry Fielding, or remember Tony Richardson’s movie version of Tom Jones. There are stray notes of Dickens and Kipling, as well as crime melodrama. (Slumdog was adapted from a novel by former Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup.) But the movie’s amalgamated style is largely its own.

The slim Patel is a quietly sensitive, sometimes almost grave presence on screen and his engaging performance helps knit the proceedings together. There are a number of skilled supporting contributions, especially Kapoor’s, Mittal’s sinuously underhanded, clever Salim, and Ifran Khan as a perceptive, skeptical police inspector.

Slumdog sweeps us along to its offbeat Bollywood conclusion, but there’s room for a little disquiet at its somewhat cavalier treatment of the swarming, squalid, dangerous third world setting the movie sets its action against. The optimistically populist note it strikes at the end doesn’t really expunge the question of exploitation for entertainment.