film, eyeballs, brain

I’ll start this entry on Danny Boyle’s marvelous, if contrived, neon-lit dream jungle fantasy of a film with a quotation not having anything to do with the movies:

“The damned of Harlem and the South Bronx, the damned of Calcutta and Naples, the damned of… San Salvador and Manila; all these unskilled… but endlessly resourceful masses, laboring here one day and there another; idle and then not idle, starving and then not starving, alternating always between today’s hope and tomorrow’s despair; all these men, women, and children, with their eyes like wolves’ eyes, constitute a single if ignored human type who may have far more in common with one another… than anyone has yet imagined or attempted to verify.”

That’s the late anthropologist Thomas Belmonte, in his classic 1974 ethnography The Broken Fountain, who, despite his attempts to argue against “a culture of poverty” – that is, that “the poor” do not possess a common set of attitudes and behaviors that keep them in the underclass – still argues that they may “constitute a single… human type”. Belmonte was, of course, well aware of the great variations between different economic and political regimes that impinged upon the lives of the poor, but nonetheless the idea he advances – that they “may have far more in common with one another” – is rather tempting. The Global South could, in fact, be everywhere.

I can’t wholly agree with the idea that the poor are the same all over the world – a reductive rephrasing of the argument, I know, but I’m far too much of a believer in cultural specificity – but I’ll be damned if material conditions and cinematic narrative didn’t align so perfectly in this movie. I couldn’t help thinking, while watching Slumdog Millionaire, that practically everything on screen – the ever-increasing gap between rich and poor, the warren of alleys that make up the slums, the trash-choked rivers, the syndicate of child beggars, the scavengers taking up residence in the massive garbage dump, the art of the street hustle, our hero’s brief stint as a tourist guide for clueless Westerners, the customer-service call centers, the sudden explosion of a hyperglobalized economy (and the infrastructure that goes with it), the beautifully photographed scenes of people bathed in blue and huddled in front of a small television set as part of an imagined electronic community – could have all been filmed in the Philippines. Probably with better musical numbers, I might add.

(Note to any potential Filipino filmmakers thinking of remaking this: just about the biggest problem when filming child actors is the strong temptation to make them into overacting huggable little twerps too clever for their own good, and which therefore pulls the movie rudely away from any shot at verisimilitude. Resist the urge, I say.)

But enough digression. By this time, everyone reading this probably knows what the wildly popular movie is about: it’s the story of Jamal Malik (played convincingly as an adult by Dev Patel), a chai-wallah and orphan from the slums of Mumbai who, impossibly, cleans up on the TV show “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” But before he gets to the final question, he is suspected of cheating and thrown into prison, where the film opens, and is brutally interrogated by the police. What follows is the cinematic equivalent of a picaresque novel – albeit one with flashbacks and flash-forwards embedded in each other – with the movie following the lives of Jamal, his brother Salim, and the “third musketeer” (Jamal’s love, Latika) in their various urban misadventures, both harrowing and hilarious.

Despite its occasional sordidness, the film is a delight to look at. Nobody films a chase scene, for instance, quite like Danny Boyle, who’s an intensely visual director: the framing off-kilter, cameras mounted overhead or staring up from the ground, backgrounds blipping in and out of focus. There are even shots of children vaulting across roofs straight off Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, leaping, as it were, from one ghetto to another. (Boyle, along with his cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, was also responsible for the controversial “running zombies” in 28 Days Later from 2002. Now that had some great chase scenes too.) Even the Boyle-helmed episodes of “Inspector Morse”, a television series not known for breaking convention, were filmed and edited as if it were “Homicide: Life on the Street”.

But in contrast to the steel grays of 28 Days Later (or the oppressive amber tones of 2007′s Sunshine), Slumdog Millionaire practically explodes with color – even the rotting garbage is rendered in loving, brilliant Technicolor. It’s something of a risk, actually, as the film treads a fine line between Western pity and an aestheticization of their abased condition. But it’s certainly not romanticized (though there’s an exhilarating montage of the two brothers riding on train roofs, set to M.I.A. felicitously singing about “sitting on trains”); life in the slums is horrific and nasty and violent, and indeed, so are parts of the movie. But it’s important to note that Slumdog Millionaire, despite its unsentimental depiction of poverty, isn’t voyeuristic, either. Sure, there’s still Boyle’s fascination with fecal matter (most memorably demonstrated in Trainspotting from 1996 – and that had a great chase scene too), but it’s also played for laughs, and the film isn’t the Mondo Cane tour of Third World horrors that it could potentially have been.

Nonetheless, Boyle sets you up for an unapologetic crowd-pleaser of an ending – so much so that it momentarily prevents the audience from examining the numerous contrivances too closely. The film’s lattice of incredible coincidences follows directly from the film’s structure: each game question, supposedly increasing in degree of difficulty (but doesn’t, actually), is directly linked to something in Jamal’s past. (It inadvertently gives us the impression, unfortunately, that Jamal, as streetwise as he is, truly is the mere recipient of pure dumb luck.)

It’s difficult for the viewer, though, to withhold her or his goodwill. My investment in Jamal’s gripping story – aided by the uniformly excellent performances from the nine leads – was far too deep at this point for me not to expect huge, positive returns, and the payoff for the audience is, well, 10 million rupees and even more. Just don’t look too close.

And if Slumdog Millionaire doesn’t quite connect all the dots from the slums to the office towers – that’s some literal upward mobility! – I suppose that’s fine, for, as the movie proclaims, “it is written”, and who are we to question the grand designs of Destiny? It’s an entertaining journey nonetheless, and, as with all those different versions of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” worldwide, I look forward to the remakes coming soon to a Third World theater near you.

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Possibly related posts:

1. Danny Boyle, “Sunshine” (2007).
2. The Best Movies I Saw In 2008.
3. Brillante Mendoza, "Tirador" (2007).