Slumdog revisited...

So, I finally got a chance to watch the much talked about, Slumdog Millionaire, today as it released in theaters here today. I'll warn you in advance, if you are looking for a glowing review of the film, you are in the wrong place! Now, if you are not yet put away by my seemingly snottish remark, read on!

The film is certainly well-shot, and conveys its story quite effectively, supported by a quite excellent score composed by Indian music legend A. R. Rahman. It is captivating cinema, and in my opinion, certainly worthy of Oscar consideration. Winning, however, is another matter altogether. Danny Boyle has based the film upon Vikas Swarup's excellent novel, Q & A, but in the interest of making a commercially successful film, has chosen to change the underlying theme completely! Having read the novel first, this did not impress me at all.

Danny Boyle has chosen the formulaic but surefire method of using love as the basis for the story! Jamal, the protagonist, proudly announces that he is on the gameshow not to win money necessarily, but to try and make himself visible to his love. So typically Bollywood! And it has obviously worked here! However, the story in the novel is far more pragmatic, and the poor boy is on the gameshow to try and win as much money so that he can free his love from the clutches of a prostitution gang. Q & A, in my opinion, was an excellent novel because it dealt with the moral and ethical ambiguities that a penniless orphan (curiously named Ram Mohammad Thomas!) and those surrounding him face as they try to bridge the ever-increasing gap between the poor and rich in India. The pragmatism of the novel is what really enthralled me as a reader. The struggle to overcome poverty and destitution is a very real one in India, and the manner in which the poor boy stumbles along in his life from city to city, from situation to situation always somehow managing to extricate himself just when things were headed down the abyss, eventually landing on Who wants to be a Millionaire? as a participant, is so very believable. I felt that condensing the novel's poignant tale into love story, the likes of which have been repeated ad nauseum in Bollywood, diminished the overall lustre of the production.

The other major qualm I had about the film has to do with the casting of Jamal, the protagonist. Yes, I realize the film was shot in English and hence, the main characters all have to speak predominantly in English. However, it was quite obvious to me, and hence a little incredulous, that Dev Patel, who played Jamal in the film, had a distinct British accent. This was totally out-of-place in my opinion, since he plays a poor Mumbai slumdweller in the film! Why could Danny Boyle not have found an actor (Indian or otherwise) and have him speak gutteral English (or at least English with a Desi twang), so as to lend more credibility to the character? It seems like this would have been a relatively straightforward and obvious thing to fix, and yet it has not been done!

All in all, Slumdog Millionaire is a decent film as I said at the beginning. It has made the awards rounds and gained such massive publicity simply because the film was shot in English by a prominent Hollywood director, thus appealing to Western audiences in a very direct way. That's just the reality of it, I think. There have been, without doubt, far better films made in India, in English, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and Malayalam. However, those films have suffered from having to compete under the Foreign Films category, which is amazingly stiff competition and hence, in some ways, even more prestigious than the Best Movie award! Let us hope the success of Slumdog Millionaire will encourage Hollywood to give more exposure to India films, actors and stories. Surely this is just the beginning, as Bollywood's very own King Khan famously uttered "कहानी अभी बाखी है मेरे दोस्त" (the story remains unfinished, my friend).