Slumdog Millionaire Danny Boyle UK 2008
Gameshow film Slumdog Millionaire, a film about winning lots of money, has unsurprisingly in the current climate, already proved popular around the world.
Told around the globally popular television quiz show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the film follows contestant Jamal (played by UK actor Dev Patel) on the Indian version of the show. No one can understand how a lowly call centre tea boy, a Mumbai ‘Slumdog', or slum dweller, could have done so well.
He is taken into police custody and interrogated after breezing through the gameshow questions. The story unfolds with each question, explaining in painful detail how he knows the answers, and how, incredibly, Jamal has achieved as much as he has despite growing up in a violent shanty town.
Based on the Indian novel Q&A, the film directed by UK director Danny Boyle, flashes more style than substance, just like the unfashionable gameshow.
At first TV shows might seem unfamiliar territory for the British director who made his name with the drug addiction drama Trainspotting. But some may remember his film Millions, about a young boy finding a bag full of money just before an imagined switch-over from the Pound to the Euro. Slumdog Millionaire is similar but it ups the stakes even further by setting the drama in a rapidly changing society with a massive gap between rich and poor.
In keeping with Boyle's previous films, Slumdog Millionaire jumps out at the eye audaciously. Opening with a chase right into the slums of Mumbai, Boyle and his cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle zoom the viewer through dirt, noise and pollution. But crucially they don't lose sight of the sheer fun of being young and being alive as they follow the youthful Jamal. Where another director might have instantly unveiled the depressing reality of it all, Boyle's kinetic take is more optimistic.
Winning a game show is all about wish fulfilment and Jamal's background in the film is absurd if you start to think about it too much. Viewers should be cautious about this dazzling image of India. Jamal runs round the slums of Mumbai, his mother is killed in an anti-Muslim riot, he is taken in by crooks, he escapes on the Indian train network, he ‘works' tourists at the Taj Mahal and then returns back to Mumbai to be on television. All this is not impossible but about as likely as someone from the slums winning Who Wants to be a Millionaire or a taxi driver winning Mastermind (as actually happened in 1980).
Once Slumdog Millionaire catches its breath it is basically a riveting episode of an old game-show. Just like any gameshow, though, when it comes down to the final moment the tension is breathtaking.
