I went to see this movie with my wife Myrna and walked out a half hour later after a child has his eyes burned out with molten metal. This was done to make him into a more profitable beggar. It was part of a primitive capitalist enterprise run by a couple of otherwise nice guys who befriend homeless kids only to exploit them in cruel but not sexual ways. A few minutes earlier, a child had escaped an elevated latrine he's trapped in by jumping through the bottom and into a very deep pool of doo-doo. Covered head to toe in glue-like excrement, his stink miraculously parts a dense crowd thronging around a visiting film star. And so it goes for heavy handed plot drivers and even heavier social commentary.
Director Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, Train Spotting) is the grand master of high-impact, heavy-handed films assault films that also carry serious social messages. I like his verve but I find his films hard to watch. He's made an odd genre marriage: MTV hooking up with the action thriller genre to pay a visit to the long vanished social conscience films of Stanley Kramer and Sidney Lumet. He may have invented a new genre, perhaps a new cinematic syntax. Maybe it’s how we should be communicating in such a complex, interconnected, boundary stradling, wired world.
In the first 30 minutes of Slumdog the director uses a bright cinematic palette and very fluid, expressive camera work to chronicle the violence and abuse routinely inflicted on helpless children. Our introduction to the main characters, Jamal, Salim and Latika, is a very up-close and cringeful experience of the poverty of their lives. Never one to let the audience get too comfortable, Mr. Boyle jerks his story line 20 years ahead in time when Jamal is a contestant on the Indian franchise for “Who Wants To Be a MiIlionaire?” where he is quite graphically tortured for answering too many questions correctly. Then we zip back to childhood again and forward to points in between. It’s exciting enough but by the time the molten lead is poured, I’d had it with this very dark Dickensian fable and its slumdog-eat-slumdog capitalism. Aren't we getting a belly full of this kind of stuff every day now in the current financial meltdown? Gimme a break and lemme out of here.
A few weeks later I gave the film another try because Elizabeth, a film friend whose opinion I respect, told me that the movie changed gears after the scenes described above and became very compelling. I went without Myrna this time because she's very sensitive to all manner of violence and I sometimes don't stay with tougher films when we go to see them together.
Turns out, Elizabeth was right. I ended up enjoying the film and was shocked to discover that it turned out to be a love story. I got interested in Jamal and Latika’s impossible quest to be together, eventually triumphing against the powerful and nasty forces keeping them apart. I won’t get into the plot machinations because they are inordinately silly. But the funny thing is that they work if you take this fable on its own terms. Frankly, I was grateful to find any human warmth and kindness at all in this film after my initial clsoe enounter. Love triumphs uber alles is not a bad message to take out of the Cineplex, especially after being beaten up with powerful cinematic techniques.
Then out of nowhere, the credits rolling, the entire cast is putting on Michael Jackson moves in an alley. No more poverty and third world despair for this crew. Bring on cool, sexy and, well, joyful. It looked like West Side Story, Indian style. I wish Danny Boyle hadn’t saved it for a closing riff. Perhaps the time will come when Bollywood trumps Hollywood once and for all. There are more things, Horatio, in heaven and earth than your producers can dream of.
3 comments:
I cringed too, but within the first 5 minutes I had the sense that this was a new style of cinema that riveted me to my seat -- in fact I deemed it the best story-telling I had seen in quite some time. Of course we need to get beyond the portrayal of the slums and the "new" India and recognize that India is a very different place than here. It is a story of culture clash and change and in the end a love story - of people and of the people (all of them) in India. It inspired me to watch the
PBS 6 hour series on India and realize that there was so very much to learn.
Oh, yes, and at the Downing Film Center in Newburgh we wanted to dance at the end but the audience remained rivited to the final notes.
The final dance number said that everything which has come before is entertainment. Here you see we are just making a movie with the same song and dance routines providing entertainment for decades. It was all just make-believe. We know you were worked up by the horrors you have seen. They are based on something but the truth be told , it was just part of the song and dance of movies, so go home and have a good time with your partner.
I mind being jolted, spun around and then patted on the head so I can sleep at night. Nonetheless it was done well enough to hold me, even the farewell dance party.
The scene where the child jumps down through the outhouse slosh signaled the happy ending. It was so over the top, it had to be that. So, I took all the other ultra-disgusting scenes in
the same spirit--and, in fact, I thought that one of the gifts of the movie was the balance of those scenes against the rather insipid "hero" and fluffy love affair which otherwise would have been too ugh- gooey. Also, both those ends of life's spectrum probably are true of Mumbai, I should think. The winning game guess and boy-gets-girl ending were what I had expected from that first latrine scene. I found characters such as the awful game-show host and the cruelty of
the older brother and the keeper of now-grown girl were terrific.
That movie for me qualified as the first just pure Entertainment I've seen in a long long while-- and couldn't we all use some entertainment right about now! (By the way, I'm with Myrna: but by now I have a pretty fail-safe way of covering eyes and ears to get through the violent spots.)
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