SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
Reviewed in the Philo Trust Magazine
Slumdog Millionaire combines a compelling story with winsome child actors, starting visuals and pulsing music composed by Bollywood’s (India’s) best, AR Rahman As such, the movie captivates its audience and sends us from the theatre singing, buoyed with hope and joy.
Slumdog Millionaire continues the wonderful narrative filmmaking of Danny Boyle, a Brit whose ‘G‘ rated film Millions was inspirational, and whose much grittier movie Trainspotting first gained him his much deserved reputation as one of this generation’s finest independent filmmakers. Boyle is typically interested in portraying the sublime, even (or particularly) in squalor, hardship and pain, and Slumdog Millionaire is no exception. As a reviewer writes, it is none of the most upbeat stories about living in hell imaginable’!
Shot in the slums of Mumbai, India, the movie is filled with paradox. It portrays wretched squalor yet it is breathtakingly beautiful. It is at once hard-edged and joy-filled. Poverty, brutality, abuse, and inhumanity are omnipresent (and thus the movie is not for those under sixteen or so) but somehow, life’s harsh realism is never given the last word. Instead, life is affirmed in all its possibility and wonder. Like Millions, there is a childhood innocence that pervades the movie, centred in a youthful narrator. This gives the movie a charm, filling viewers with a sense of wonder and possibility.
Slumdog Millionaire begins with a question being typed on the screen as Jamal Malik sits poised before the TV cameras of India’s version of ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.’ He has agreed to come back on the next show to answer his final question which could win him twenty million rupees. The text reads, ‘How did he do it? A) He cheated. B) He’s lucky. C) He’s a genius. D) It is written.‘ The rest of the movie provides viewers an answer(s), not only with regards to Jamal’s life, but also perhaps to our own.
Told mainly in flashbacks through the eyes of this eighteen year old from one of India’s poorest neighbourhoods, we watch in horror as Jamal is picked up by police and brutally accused by the inspectors of cheating on the show. After all, how could an uneducated ‘Slumdog’ know enough to get to the final round without missing a question? As the interrogators show Jamal videotapes of each round leading up to the grand prize, asking him how he knew the answers, Jamal responds to his accusers’ harsh doubts by recalling those events in his life that provided him his ‘street wisdom.‘ There is, again as in Millions, a fable-like quality to Boyle’s story. That Jamal’s life would perfectly unfold chronologically to provide him with the needed answers strains credulity. But it doesn’t matter; we don’t ask. Along with his TV audience, we are sucked in to Jamal’s life. We want to believe that ‘miracles’ are possible in his life, and we do.
As Jamal’s story unfolds, we come to understand his motive for continuing on the show, rather than playing it safe by taking the money he has already won. It is not what we might imagine. Rather than money or greed being the motivator, it is love. Having seen his mom murdered by fundamentalists when he is eight, Jamal becomes, along with his brother Salim, and the beautiful little girl, Latika, one of ‘three Musketeers‘. What they endure shouldn’t happen to anyone, but it causes them to bond. And then fate steps in again and separates Jamal and Latika. The quiz show is Jamal’s means of reconnecting with her after years of separation; surely she will see him, and he will find again his true love. We in the audience root for him that this might indeed happen. The ending is never really in doubt, though how the finale is filmed will bring a smile to even the most calloused viewer.
Slumdog Millionaire has much to teach us about the inhumanity of life for millions of the world’s poor. India is a ‘character’ in the film. Its social stratification becomes a particularly vivid example of the extremes of poverty and wealth that are present worldwide — hovels and TV stations, child prostitutes and cutting edge technology exist side by side. Even while we celebrate the rags to riches story we see, we find our consciences being seared. The Mumbai slums, like our own, should not be. There is more, however. The movie also shows viewers something of the dignity of the human. Despite circumstances, Jamal is filled with idealism. There is a primacy of spiritual values in this young boy — of faith, love, and hope. His spirit transforms the 60 million viewers of ‘Millionaire’ into his fan club, just as it does us.
But more even than this, Slumdog Millionaire is about ‘It is written‘. It reveals that sense of destiny that propels Jamal’s life forward. Jamal recognizes that there is more to life than meets the eye - that all of life is destined, including the ‘love’ of his life. It is this sense of being grounded in a larger Reality that keeps Jamal on track, even when circumstance would suggest all is lost. We can learn from young Jamal, even while grounding our hope more concretely in Jesus’ grace-filled promises. It was our Lord who assured us:
Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.... Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows (Mt. 10:28-31).
Or as our African American spiritual puts it, ‘He’s got the whole world in his hand’.
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