Watchmen can wait, I have finally seen Slumdog, this year's little movie that could. Having won nearly every major award stateside, and many international prizes as well, it's as hard not to root for this movie as it is not to root for its plucky young protagonist, Jamal [Dev Patel]. I have a friend from India who has worked in the film industry there, and found Slumdog too feel-good for his taste. But on Oscar night, he was cheering the movie's multiple awards as enthusiastically as anyone. Sorry, Lakshmi, you're busted.What is undeniable, even for those who aren't crazy about it, is that this film manages to embody globalization in its very being. Based on the Indian novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup, co-directed by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan, and scored by A.R. Rahman, Slumdog Millionaire is a heady mix of Bollywood, Charles Dickens, Trainspotting, Frank Capra, and the British export which conquered so many of the world's media markets in localized versions, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Some aspects of the narrative structure have been criticized for straining credibility [the answers coincide with Jamal's autobiographical chronology?], but I think this speaks to the film's hybrid genre, one-part Mumbai ghetto realism and one-part familiar fairy tale. As Scott Foundas wrote in the Village Voice, "Like so many of the Bollywood melodramas it stylistically apes, Boyle's film is unapologetically pop, even as Boyle himself seems to be at once inside and outside the idiom, embracing it while winking slyly at our collective need for escapist fantasy. Then, just when you figure he has pulled out all the stops, Boyle proves to have one more trick left up his sleeve: a joyous musical number that sends everybody out of the theater feeling like a winner." Jai Ho!
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