Slumdog Millionaire set in Mumbai, India, opens with a pair of policemen brutally interrogating a young man, using torture to coax him to talk. So far it's not working. Convinced the boy in their custody is a criminal, one of the men asks the other how a kid from the slums can make 20 million rupees (about $400,000 U.S.) on a game show without cheating. "I knew the answers," the young man responds wearily. With those words, Slumdog Millionaire bounces back in time, cleverly showing us exactly how Jamal Malik, an 18-year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai, came to find himself on the cusp of a fortune.
Jamal (played by Dev Patel as a young man and, as with the other leads, two other actors at various stages of childhood) is a product of squalor, of homes built on and out of the refuse discarded from the rest of society. When Jamal's mother is murdered during an anti-Muslim raid, he and older brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) are forced to fend for themselves.
They survive on hook, crook and sheer resourcefulness, taking in another orphan teen girl, Latika (Freida Pinto), with whom Jamal is instantly smitten. Eventually they are picked up by a hustler who runs a sort of criminal orphanage. Each day the lost boys and girls beg for money in the city to bring back to their "benefactor." When Salim discovers the danger they are in, he and Jamal flee, leaving Latika behind.
As the years pass, Jamal takes odd jobs to survive, some of them honest, some of them not. Salim turns to increasingly violent crime to fill his belly. The brothers are a study in contrasts—one does what he needs to survive yet stubbornly holds onto his soul, while the other gladly trades his soul in, ecstatic at the street price it brings.
Desperate to reconnect with Latika, Jamal insists they return to Mumbai and begin searching for her. Though the brothers eventually find her in the most hopeless of situations, one in which she is bought and sold like so much chattel, Jamal never loses hope that they will one day be together again.
Throughout life's challenges, Jamal is astute and observant, soaking in his surroundings. He is able to instinctively draw from this deep reservoir when it matters most—appearing on the garish game show, "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" Each question posed to him correlates to experiences in his past, though both the show's host (Anil Kapoor) and the police officer (Irfan Khan) who must decide his fate cannot comprehend how such knowledge is possible. Nor can they, or the galvanized nation which watches each night, figure out why a young man who seems to care nothing about the prize money is so intent on winning it all. Slumdog Millionaire flies on the wings of an effervescent energy, bursts with dazzling color, and is set to the pulse-pounding music of AR Rehman. Boyle has always been at the forefront of the digital medium, and with Slumdog Millionaire, he shows why he deserves to be at the pinnacle of those courageous artists who dare greatly and succeed beyond even their wildest dreams.Slumdog Millionaire reveals India, both old and new, a place of filth and waste as well as rebirth and resistance. We watch as the nation embraces the 21st century, rising from the ashes of poverty for some, but at the crushing cultural price of a distinctly Western frivolity, hollowness and nihilism. Boyle does not alter the anthropological details of his location, so much as he injects his unique fantasy directly into the preexisting mix just to see how it will be remade in the image of the new setting.
Slumdog Millionaire is, quite simply, one of the best films of 2008. It is a fable, and if you try to apply the strict rules of reality, you will come away disappointed. Instead, surrender to the contrived magic of a film that dares to use dialogue like this …
"Come away with me."
"And live on what?"
"Love."
Sankibaba Rating - 4.5/5 (a must watch)
