There are two seminal questions that present themselves right off the top of Danny Boyle’s new film Slumdog Millionaire. The first, about how the main character Jamal is one question away from winning the top prize on Who Wants to be a Millionaire and how that could be possible, appears in plain view and kicks the narrative into first gear right out of the door.
The second question is more subtle and subdued, easier to miss, but is the one that gets right to the heart of the matter. When suspected of cheating, a police officer asks Jamal, “What could a slumdog possibly know?”
The answer to the first question gets the plot from beginning to end. The answer to the second is as joyous, wonderful, suspenseful and heartbreaking as one could imagine and from it, a great film is born.
The Story
Slumdog Millionaire tells the story of Jamal who is born and lives with his brother in a ghetto in Mumbai India until their mother is killed in a religious riot, and thus their travels across the vast expanses, both geographic and social, of India begin.
The story is told through flashback as Jamal in the present finds himself one question away from winning the big prize on the Indian television equivalent of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. After answering every question except the big one correctly, Jamal is suspected by the host of the program of somehow cheating and is taken into custody for questioning. He then recounts his life story to the officer as a means to explain how he knew all of the answers. Jamal’s justification will be the one thing that stands between him being kicked off the program or welcomed back for another night to answer the last question.
Approach
But now, a description of this plot will do no good, as the suspense is not in the description but in the way the action comes to be and what is learned from it along the way, the plot masterfully unfolding as if falling from the pen of a great storyteller.
One cares about Jamal, about his relationship with his brother Salim and the orphan girl Latika who may be the love of his life. The film is painted with such caring, detailed, nurturing brush strokes that the viewer is effortlessly swept up and taken along on Jamal’s journey as he ventures through ghettos, brothels, crime rings, train cars and abandoned buildings.
Danny Boyle, one of the few stylists of the cinema, whose aesthetic excesses actually almost always manage to work for the story instead of against it, employing a handheld camera, gets audiences so close to the action and so immersed in the journey that it is India itself and not the Millionaire plot that becomes the film’s most central focus; it’s most compelling point. Slumdog Millionaire is part travelogue, part cultural commentary and part fairy tale, in about that order.
All in a Title
The title then, is the most perfect one that any film could ask for; far better, for certain, than Q&A, the title of the book that acted as the film’s source material. Read it again: Slumdog Millionaire, and think of what such a contradictory title implies. It is simple yet complex, obvious yet subtle, and it explains in simple yet perfect detail everything that the film is about and how it is about it.
It is both documentary and whimsy, both cultural document and engrossing narrative, both horrifying and uplifting. It is about both society and class, both cultural devastation and popular culture in a specific country, and, most importantly, it is about reality and fiction and how the two come to overlap and influence one other.
Verdict
If, from this discription, Slumdog Millionaire sounds convoluted and messy, than accept this apology because, as is the case with almost all truly original works, there is no description that could do the story justice.
Every scene jumps off the screen with joy and life, energized by the simple pleasure of providing a detailed portrait of a society as it functions, collapses, and builds itself back up again. In that sense, Jamal’s story is also very much India’s story as well.
And then it ends with a message that is beautiful in a way that only simple universal truths are. Watching it brings to mind a quote from Mark Twain, which said something to the tune of how "One must not let their schooling get in the way of their education."
One can read books and memorize facts and become endowed with all the culture in the world, but what good are such tidbits? They can be taken to dinner tables to impress company; can be made into speeches to rouse those who are entrenched with the same facts, or they can be taken on game shows and win unimaginable amounts of money, but is that true knowledge; true intelligence? It is not.
That's why that second question is so important: what could a slumdog possible know? Well, how about: how to live, love, cry, hurt, learn, survive, overcome adversity and become a better person in spite of it? Those are what Slumdog Millionaire is about: those simple facts of life. Final answer.
