New Film Puts Twist on Millionaire Game Show

By Broadside Reporter Jonathon Vaughan. Photo Courtesy of Fox Searchlight.

In Danny Boyle’s new film, Slumdog Millionaire, a young Indian boy is in Bombay on his country’s version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. But, because he seems to know all the answers, he is tried for fraud. Through a series of flashbacks, the story reveals that he had been given the answers during the meaningful moments of his life. The story has a religious and philosophical subtext like two previous Boyle films, the Catholic Millions and the peculiar science fiction of Sunshine. However, this film is a stylistic breakthrough for the director; it is deliriously colorful. If you tried to imagine the feverish sequences off of the train in The Darjeeling Limited made into an entire movie, you get an idea of what Slumdog Millionaire is like. I enjoyed the dynamic use of subtitles in some parts of the movie where words would drift around the screen and become color coded to the characters speaking them.

The story is about love, destiny, survival and violence. The first half of the film is like a Bombay version of City of God as the boy and his brother, both orphaned at a young age, fight for their survival. This has to be the closest a western film has come to depicting the epic ruins and slums in India. The film contains hypnotic sequences of the boys finding both danger and the sublime in the commercial debris-filled urban ruins. These sequences often have pulsing trance-like techno music, and are also often gritty and violent.

The second half of the movie is more concerned with the boy as an adult trying to find a way out of the slums and reunite himself with the girl he has always loved. There is a lot of ambiguity about how westernization has affected the society in this movie. It seems as if there’s a ray of hope in the bright lights of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. The movie spirals into a wildly enthusiastic Zen-like ending which blossoms into a love story. This ending almost seems at odds with the gritty tone of the movie’s first two-thirds and seems to recall Boyle’s own flawed but charming A Life Less Ordinary in the way it swells to an extravagant music-video-like climax. This quality works in Slumdog Millionaire, however, because of the highly musical nature of Bollywood culture, it may turn off some western viewers. This movie is required viewing for anyone interested in modern India and its culture, but may not convert those who find Boyle’s films to be generally style over substance.