Henry Saw: Slumdog Millionaire

Great film. Hollywood...it's your move.


So this is it. The start of the "Oscar Season" and our first entree here at PITAOE is Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle's new film set in India, and it is very, very good. Excellent in fact.

I will let IMDB summarize the plot as they do a good job:

"The story of Jamal Malik , an 18 year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai, who is about to experience the biggest day of his life. With the whole nation watching, he is just one question away from winning a staggering 20 million rupees on India's "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" But when the show breaks for the night, police arrest him on suspicion of cheating; how could a street kid know so much? Desperate to prove his innocence, Jamal tells the story of his life in the slum where he and his brother grew up, of their adventures together on the road, of vicious encounters with local gangs, and of Latika, the girl he loved and lost."

For each answer Jamal gets right, he has a story from his troubled life story that has allowed him to get the answer right. It's a brilliant story device and despite the fact that the movie has very grim moments, the set-up makes the whole thing a total delight.

We follow Jamal, his brother, and Latika through three different stages of their lives and their characters are played by different actors for each age. Perhaps the most "fun" part of the movie comes when the characters are all young children. My Mom described this section as being Dickensian and she is absolutely right. We see the kids struggle with poverty, fall into distressing situations, and wiggle their way out of them.

The sections dealing with their adolescence is very upsetting, but it all serves to set up a very satisfying conclusion...The problem is that I don't wanna say too much about the film as I went in knowing hardly anything and it made the experience much better.

All that you need to know is that, as far as I'm concerned, this is the best movie of the year thus far. I find it impossible to come up with a true complaint about the film. The only thing I could say is that there are moments that are predictable and that the whole thing plays out exactly as one guesses / hopes it will. But you know what? That's not a bad thing. Slumdog Millionaire is a fairy tale on screen. It's uplifting, intelligent, brutal, playful, interesting...it's fantastic.

And Freida Pinto is probably the most beautiful woman to appear in a movie this year.

This is Danny Boyle's best film. Previous credit's include Trainspotting, Shallow Grave, The Beach, 28 Days Later, and Sunshine. I love Trainspotting and 28 Days Later...this really blows them out of the water. This is a classic. The Wall Street Journal's movie critic Joe Morgenstern wrote "Slumdog Millionaire" is the film world's first globalized masterpiece," and "The scale of "Slumdog Millionaire" is close to cosmic. Jamal's fate transcends the slums; it transcends India. He really is an Oliver Twist for the 21st century, just as his beloved Latika is a multinational mingling of Juliet, Lara and the Vivien Leigh of "Waterloo Bridge."

I thought Morgenstern was being silly when I read his review (before seeing the movie). Now I find it hard to disagree with him. So now the question is can one of the hyped Hollywood movies compare to Slumdog? Can Doubt, Frost/Nixon, Milk, etc. be as good as this film? It's certainly possible. But the bar has been raised high. Look, I know Slumdog won't win best picture. It's just not the winning type. But I can't tell you that at the end of the year that I won't think that Slumdog wasn't the best film of the year.

See Slumdog Millionaire as soon as you can. Forget Twilight, Quantum of Solace, Australia this week, Frost/Nixon next week (which you'll have plenty of time to see)...see Slumdog Millionaire while you can. It's a perfect little film and it will remind you that sometimes going to the movies is about having fun and believing that good exists in this world.

A delight.

Grade: A+

Best Scene? Jamal gets an autograph from his favorite actor.

Seriously, I'm begging you, go see this film.