Directrospective: SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (2008)
Notes on the films of English director and central Smurfs antagonist Danny Boyle.
“Look at these pitiful creatures, they’re covered in shit and they like it! I put the shit on them myself!” - Danny Boyle
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE is Danny Boyle’s most decorated film, the one that won eight Academy Awards, more than any other 2008 film, including Best Picture, Best Director for Boyle, Best Cinematography for his main dude Anthony Dod Mantle, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Simon Beaufoy, with whom Boyle would go on to co-write 127 HOURS. It’s also Boyle’s highest-grossing film to date. It’s also one of his most odious.
In a career full of aesthetically aggressive morality plays - fetid fairy tales, if you’ll allow it - SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE is Boyle’s most fetid and most fabulous film. Yet another literary adaptation, this time loosely from the 2005 novel Q & A by Vikas Swarup, the film’s heroes are unfailingly heroic, its villains irredeemably cruel, its damsel fully distressed, its moral universe stark. It tells the story of Jamal Malik (played as a child, young teen, and adult by Ayush Mahesh Khedekar, Tanay Chheda, and Dev Patel), 18-year-old poorer-than-dirt boy from Mumbai’s Juhu slums, who has shocked the nation by winning the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? despite being a disgusting poor person. Convinced he must have cheated, the show’s host has turned him over to the cops, whose jurisdiction apparently includes game show propriety.
The film intercuts Jamal’s interrogation, the game show appearance the night before, and his recollections of specific abject traumas he endured as a child that, incredibly, happened to lodge each question’s answer in his scarred mind forever. Across these recollections, we learn how he and his brother Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala, and Madhur Mittal) were orphaned when a gang of Islamophobic bigots murdered their mother. We watch as a tiny Jamal escapes from the outhouse in which his brother has deviously trapped him by jumping through the hole where the shit goes, and landing in the pile of shit, and running around completely covered in stinky brown shit. Dookie Boyle, dormant since TRAINSPOTTING, has awoken from his slumber. We see them taken in with their friend Latika (Rubina Ali, Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar, Freida Pinto), a girl, by a Fagin-type named Maman (Ankur Vikal) who trains street children to be extra pitiful, forcibly blinding the most promising ones with chloroform and a hot spoon to maximize their return. The boys escape Maman but Latika gets left behind. They ride the rails, hustling and stealing and giving fugazi tours of the Taj Mahal to white chumps. We see them track down Latika, whom Maman is somehow grooming to become a prostitute but in a way that we know she hasn’t been sexually assaulted yet so we’re not too upset during the movie, and then Salim decides to become the Crime Brother and shoot Maman dead. He also makes Jamal leave at gunpoint, then disappears with Latika to get a job doing more crimes. Jamal eventually gets his own job making tea at a call center and carries his sad torch for Latika. He happens to know that she watches Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and decides his best shot at finding her is to get her attention on live TV.
As each question comes up on the show, Jamal is able to recall the answer not from general knowledge but from specific emotional pain. Pinned to each brutal memory is a bit of religious iconography Jamal saw as his mother was being killed, or a song he heard a blinded kid singing, or a movie star whose autograph was precious enough for him to jump into a five-foot-high pile of dookie shit to get. Everything that we ever learn is learned some way or another, and association is a commonly used tool to strengthen and improve memory, sure. But host Prem Kumar (Bollywood megastar Anil Kapoor) may as well ask Jamal, “What is the name of the man who tried to traffic your childhood friend Latika before your brother Salim shot him?” (There is indeed a question about gun manufacturers which that incident helps Jamal to answer.) That the worst moments in Jamal’s life would have uniquely prepared him for each and every question in Kumar’s pile is ludicrous, but it’s the extraordinary thing that animates the plot. Beneath the ultraDickensian hypersqualor, this is still a fairy tale. I suppose I prefer the miraculous version to an alternative explanation where Jamal has undergone so many unimaginable horrors that he’s amassed a huge knowledge base of which these ten or so questions barely scratch the surface.
Kumar is convinced Jamal must have cheated. No poor slumdog (a term that reportedly made the film difficult to market in India, where, like in the rest of the world, “slumdog” is not a thing anyone says) could actually know all that stuff! Poor slumdogs are stupid, that’s why they’re poor! There’s also an element of jealousy to Kumar’s conviction, as he views his own story as a rags-to-riches tale which Jamal’s threatens to cheapen. Kumar even tries to sabotage the game, feeding Jamal an answer that turns out to be false. Jamal doesn’t bite. Of course the cop (the wonderful, late Irrfan Khan) finally believes Jamal’s story, because Jamal is the hero of the movie and the cops are actually good people if you just talk to them. Of course they let Jamal come back the next night to finish the game. Of course Latika sees the broadcast and she still loves Jamal, too. Of course Salim sacrifices himself to free Latika from her crime boss captor. Of course Latika answers on Salim’s phone when Jamal uses his Phone-A-Friend lifeline, of course she doesn’t know the name of the Third Goddamned Musketeer either, of course Jamal guesses right, of course he wins all the money, of course Jamal and Latika live happily ever after.
As broad-brushed as the parched and helpless “Africa” at the end of MILLIONS, Boyle’s Mumbai is a hopelessly hostile place where brutality reigns and everyone is either totally evil or utterly miserable. But Jamal’s life is actually worth something, the film shows, even if all these doomed people stuck in their cycles of oppression can’t see it. As Boyle and Beaufoy are brave enough to teach us, a poor person’s life can actually have value! If their dehumanizing traumas can be monetized, that is. It’s not enough simply to be a human being; the fires of poverty need to have forged you into a tool for financial gain and then you can be an important hero. The people around Jamal who are beaten, blinded, trafficked, and murdered have their value, too, just less, because each of their torments is a contribution to Jamal’s escape from the muck.
Boyle delights in his poverty porn. With Mantle’s hyperactive whip pans and lens flares and helicopter shots in crunchy 2K digital and the throb of A.R. Rahman’s celebrated Indian/Euro-house fusion score, he constructs a world surging and pulsing with sun-baked indignity. In TRAINSPOTTING, Renton facetiously calls Scotland a “Third World country,” and the indignities of neoliberalism in the West cannot be dismissed. But The Worst Toilet in Scotland is at least an actual toilet. The Mumbai of SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE is designed for Western eyes, to pity and to feel cultured for noticing and to congratulate us for caring about now that we know one of the kids there knows trivia.
The film was an enormous sleeper hit, making close to $400 million worldwide. Even with its setting, its one or two Bollywood stars, its respected Bollywood composer, New Delhi native casting director Loveleen Tandan credited as “co-director” (though her name is nowhere to be found on Boyle’s directing Oscar), Boyle’s efforts to pay tribute to Indian cinema with a big dance number over the end credits and about a third of the dialogue in Hindi, and its stellar reputation elsewhere, it didn’t light the Indian box office on fire. Star Dev Patel is a native English-speaking Londoner born to parents from the Indian immigrant community in Nairobi, Kenya. His family is from the Indian state of Gujarat, where the official language is Gujarati, not Hindi. Patel was not fluent in either language during production. He was as unfamiliar to Indian audiences as he was to the rest of the world (unless they’d watched British teen soap Skins) and put on an Indian accent for the role after Boyle failed to find an established Bollywood actor who fit his idea of Jamal. After doing the uncommendable thing of deciding to make the film in the first place, Boyle did the commendable one of trying his best to honor the story’s setting, but he can’t take the English eyes out of his head. Like Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong stars Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh in CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON phonetically performing in Mandarin so Western viewers get to feel cultured because they’re watching a Chinese movie about Chinese people in China, Patel himself is part of the film’s exotic costume. Patel’s own twice-removed Indian heritage makes the absence of any real reckoning with English colonialism all the weirder. This all fits perfectly in the Danny Boyle project, packaging conventional, even center-conservative ideas in confrontational clothing. His is a Christian punk rock cinema.
It’s hardly surprising that the film won Best Picture; it’s a well-worn observation that the Oscars tend to award not the “Best,” but the “Most” (Most Production Design, Most Score, Most Actor), and this movie certainly is a lot of Picture. For all its exotic trappings, it was also the most Academy-friendly of its competitors, THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, FROST/NIXON, MILK, and everyone’s favorite movie that we have all seen, THE READER. It challenges Academy voters’ familiarity but not their worldview. Good guys are good, bad guys are bad, and the good guys will win out in the end without us having to do anything over here in America. It’s got lots of color and music and a love story and you feel good at the end. I think it’s important to note that 2008/2009 was the year and SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE the movie that broke the Oscars, as Griffin Newman has put it on the excellent Blank Check Podcast. It was the year that critical and commercial smash THE DARK KNIGHT, instant cultural touchstone, new high water mark for its genre, easily the consensus Film Of The Year, didn’t even get a nomination for Best Picture. Batman is one of the more egregiously fascistic of the comic book super heroes, the Aaron Eckhart business is too much and too long, incels on the internet are only slightly misinterpreting the film when they valorize the Joker, and it’s kind of just HEAT with face paint, but it really blew everybody’s socks off and it’s the one everybody remembers. The confusion and disappointment over THE DARK KNIGHT’s exclusion was so immense that the following year was the first in which the Academy expanded the number of potential Best Picture nominees from five to ten, specifically to allow movies people actually saw and liked - AVATAR, DISTRICT 9, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, Pixar’s UP - to get their obligatory nod while very little else about Academy predilections (which awarded THE HURT LOCKER) actually changed. I bring this up because I think it further illustrates Boyle’s position in Western cinema. He’s a little bit rock and roll, and he’s a populist, yes, but he’s more often a populist in the sense of THE BLIND SIDE than of THE DARK KNIGHT. A sheep in wolf’s clothing who will push only superficial boundaries. I’d argue that SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE is one of the Danny Boylest Danny Boyle movies, in all the worst ways.