Pure Film

Slumdog Millionaire February 28, 2010

I’ve never read the book on which this is based but my main reaction to the film was that it would have been vastly improved by removing all the sections based around Millionaire and just telling the story straight. Oh, that and all the main characters should have died in a hail of bullets in the final scene.

It just doesn’t work as a film in any coherent way. I imagine the meeting where the film is first pitched – “It’s about the poverty of Indian children who live in the slums and how they have miserable and exploited lives – no wait, the high concept is that we can make it a feelgood movie with a happy ending and some Bollywood music and dance.”

In the end we have film in which the poverty and misery is made to look chic by the way it’s shot and musically scored underpinned by all the usual Hollywood clichés. The result is something that people who really don’t care about movies can think is arty and of course it’s perfect Oscar fodder. It’s exotic, it’s abroad, it’s a bit harrowing but not too much, it has a happy ending. (Goodness knows what kind of sheltered lives some of the critics on imdb have led if they think the violence and poverty shown here is too horrific for their weak constitutions. The problem is that it’s not real enough).

I like fantasy. I like realism. On the whole I don’t think they mix well. (Pan’s Labyrinth being another example where the mixture really doesn’t work.) Danny Boyle has tried to have his cake and eat it too. It obviously worked at the box office but it didn’t work for me.