Skip to main contentWhen a man is tired of Bombay, he is tired of life. As Suketu Mehta wrote in an essay in The New York Times last month, this island metropolis of west India and headquarters of the Bollywood movie factory "stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness." As portrayed in Danny Boyle's unabashed melodrama Slumdog Millionaire, Bombay is secular and superficial, inclusive and abasing, heartlessly capitalistic and disgustingly sentimental. It is everything a city should be.
So there have always been men who are tired of Bombay. In 1992, it was Hindu thugs with brickbats and fire—they murdered and pillaged and within two years forced a nationalist government to rename the city Mumbai, after a goddess. They had their deadly echo in Islamic fanatics who bombed hotels in 1993 and trains in 2006. Hotels and trains, those launch pads of adventure and decadence: They were the targets again last month, when terrorists went on a spree of destruction, holding the city hostage for three days. Slumdog Millionaire is an unwitting beneficiary of this international crisis; rubberneckers who have heard Bombay was attacked will want to see what the extremists were attacking.
Jamal Malik, the movie's indomitable hero, is all too aware of the gods that drive people mad. An improbable contestant on the Indian version of the television game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Jamal is asked to identify the Hindu deity Ram. "I wake up every morning wishing I didn't know the answer to that question," he says. "If it wasn't for Ram and Allah, I'd still have my mother." Jamal's mom was killed by the Mumbai mobs—her death provides both the movie's most appalling event and its momentum. For this is the kind of story in which it is important that the plucky protagonist be not just a street urchin but an orphaned street urchin. It's Charles Dickens by way of Horatio Alger: Every debasement is one more reason why Jamal must ultimately emerge triumphant and rich.
There are a lot of characteristic Danny Boyle elements in this mix as well. The director has always been drawn to shocks and shit: He most memorably combined the two in Trainspotting, as Ewan McGregor's heroin junkie dove into a putrid commode to fetch two anal suppositories. Within the first 20 minutes of Slumdog, both the familiar ingredients are in evidence: Young Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar) cannonballs from an elevated toilet into a puddle of feces in order to meet his matinee idol, while the grown Jamal (Dev Patel), one quiz-show question away from luxury, is electrically tortured by a suspicious police inspector (Irfan Khan). The kid is just a chai wallah, a tea boy: What can he know of the world? But as the interrogation continues, Jamal explains that each one of his responses comes from hard-earned experience. (It helps that many of the questions have been about money and guns.) Nobody is better at collecting cultural detritus than a guy who spent his childhood sifting through a landfill.
"This is bizarrely plausible," the inspector finally admits. It is an amusing line, because if there's one description Slumdog Millionaire is in absolutely no danger of earning, it is "plausible." Jamal, who for a stretch is played by a third actor, Tanay Hemant Chheda, becomes a cheeky railway grifter alongside his brother (Madhur Mittal), works a stint as a tour guide at the Taj Mahal, and is forever smitten by the homeless waif Latika (Freida Pinto). It gives away none of the movie's surprises to note that the closing credits roll over the destined couple rocking to a Bollywood dance number. Some will protest that Slumdog Millionaire is incurably vulgar. But it is meant to be vulgar. The movie is a small child who does not care that he is covered in shit, so long as he gets a coveted autograph.
"God is great!" a character yells at the end of the movie, before his bullet-riddled body collapses into a bathtub filled with rupees. The movie's crass, giddy message is that in a city where no god has ever been that great, love and money are far better.
is rated R. It opens Friday at Fox Tower.
WWeek 2015