Directrospective: MILLIONS (2004)
Notes on the films of English director and central Smurfs antagonist Danny Boyle.
Brothers Anthony (Lewis Owen McGibbon) and Damian (Alex Etel) with a stack of the money they found.
Adapted by writer Frank Cottrell Boyce from his children’s novel of the same name (or maybe the other way around - the book and the film came out right on top of one another), MILLIONS is Boyle’s second film without screenwriter John Hodge and his first without producer Andrew Macdonald. Having just successfully reanimated (sorry) the zombie genre with 28 DAYS LATER, a sweet and pious family film is a real zag of a follow-up. But the premise is as Danny Boyle as a family film could get.
In SHALLOW GRAVE he explored what might happen if three Scottish yuppie narcissists found a bunch of money. But what might happen if two English Catholic kids found a bunch of money? What Danny Boyle’s 2004 film MILLIONS presupposes is: two English Catholic kids could find a bunch of money.
Boyle loves people who find a bunch of money. Plus it’s got trains, which he loves, and wacky camera stuff, which he also loves, and the kids have to decide whether to be selfish or selfless, which he loves too. Adding another what-if element, the film takes place in a world where the UK is about to switch over to the Euro, and any remaining unconverted sterling will be worthless very soon. He loves stakes!
So when Damian (the very good Alex Etel), a young boy obsessed with the most gruesomely martyred Catholic saints, gets walloped by a duffel bag full of nearly obsolete cash thrown out of a moving train onto his homemade cardboard hermitage, we’re in full Boyle territory. Damian, missing his late saintly mother, already spends much of his time talking to various historical saints who materialize before him. He tries very hard to do the right thing. His brother Anthony (Lewis Owen McGibbon), just a few years older, has crossed some innocence threshold that means he can’t or won’t see any of Damian’s saints, and certainly thinks he knows a lot more about how things work than Damian does. Damian needs Anthony’s help dealing with all that cash, especially with the Euro changeover coming in just a few days.
Absolved of responsibility for their windfall in all but principle, the boys are very different from their nastier SHALLOW GRAVE counterparts. It comes out that the money was “robbed,” as Damian puts it, and robbed from a train taking it to be incinerated as part of the currency conversion process. If they didn’t stumble into it, it’s not like it would have gone to someone worthier. The noble Damian’s first thoughts are philanthropic on scales large and small: he donates a wad of cash to charity along with inviting some hungry people on the street to join him for a feast at Pizza Hut. Budding slumlord Anthony wants to invest it in real estate, but if becoming a professional landowner would make sense to anyone, it’s a 12-year-old, and it’s still a far cry from Ewan McGregor and Kerry Fox’s champagne-and-furs debauchery.
Such an influx of cash still amplifies old conflicts and generates new ones, of course. The boys’ father Ronald (James Nesbitt) finds out about it soon enough, and doesn’t think two children should be the ones making the decisions. His new girlfriend, Dorothy (Daisy Donovan), seems to Anthony like an obvious gold-digger, even if she isn’t. And the geezer what robbed it in the first place wants it back, because of course he does. But these squabbles are mainly the result of misunderstanding and poor communication, and are resolved through frank discussion, not shooting and knifing.
Beyond the subject matter, Boyle’s flashy, irreverent visual style - working here with 28 DAYS LATER cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who turns out to be more than capable of handling the grammar of Boyle’s films with Brian Tufano - is quite suited to a film about and for children, whose brains are full of his kind of colorful clamor and digression.
If Boyle’s movies for adults, with all their drugs and dongs and dookie, come with a clear moral, you can bet his movie for kids does too. It would be easy for a film like this to stop at something like “don’t be greedy” or “money can’t buy happiness.” What’s most admirable about MILLIONS is that it’s a movie made for and marketed toward children and families that is explicitly about how money is fake and Jesus was a brown socialist. The conversion to the Euro, fantastical for England but plenty real elsewhere, illustrates the arbitrary nature of monetary value in a way that’s obvious enough for kids to understand. That bag of cash was technically worthless sitting on a train until it got robbed, which gave it value as currency once again. That value is still dependent on whether it’s today or tomorrow. Some of it ends up papering the walls of the boys’ house, and Damian burns the rest. If some paper is money and some paper is just paper, money is just paper too.
Kids often understand the absurdity of money better than adults - even the title points at this, because it turns out that the bag only holds about £260,000. For suburban kids, at least, any money they see is extra money. The money required to pay the mortgage and the utility bills and buy the groceries and the school supplies is invisible to them, and anything beyond that is for fun bullshit. $10 is a fortune when you don’t have any expenses. But that’s what the film is getting at. There are really only two amounts of money: Enough Money To Live and Extra Money.
My one frustration with MILLIONS (besides that it’s set at Christmastime but looks to be about 70 degrees and sunny in suburban Cheshire) is that it situates economic need as a tragic, foreign problem that can only be solved by benevolent young white children. Damian’s great philanthropic dream is to help develop water wells in Africa - just, broadly, Africa - and a feel-good final sequence finds the family, each having selfishly squirreled a little money away before Damian could burn it, choosing to do the Christlike thing, pool it together and bring it to Darkest Africa where await the grateful, helpless African villagers. It’s a childish notion of charity because it comes from the mind of a child, yes, but Damian is a sophisticated child. The saints he venerates and wishes to emulate all did their good works right where they were, in a pre-globalized world. He’s like my well-intentioned classmates in high school raising money to stop Joseph Kony’s child soldier trafficking in Uganda while people stuck in the cycle of homelessness continue to freeze to death on the streets of D.C. a few miles away. There is absolutely work to be done everywhere, and it’s good to help kids understand that until everyone has enough money to live it isn’t right for anyone to have extra. I just wish the film acknowledged how seriously capital has failed people in the “First World,” too.