Review: Slumdog Millionaire

This is a biased review. Slumdog Millionaire is the best movie I’ve seen in a long time.
It’s not a shiny Hollywood tear-jerker, nor a totally weird, arty piece of junk. I’d call it more of a realistic and refreshing Bollywood half-way house.

From the moment Jamal appears on screen in ratty clothes, scampering off a decrepit Indian runway, you can’t help but want him to be the hero. And thankfully, the quick insertion of the dirty-faced giggling Latika creates a relationship tension that assures you he will be.

From this point, we get to follow Jamal’s trail to adulthood as his innocence melts into a life of petty crime, poverty and separation from Latika. All of this is told via flashbacks as the unlikely slumdog, Jamal, sits on the verge of winning Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

As a nice change, the flick contains relatively little swearing or sex and just a moderate amount of violence. Slumdog Millionaire offers a strikingly honest picture of poverty in India. It is an existence that most of us could never imagine, and frankly, we’d prefer not to be confronted with.

When Jamal takes the dive into a toilet-pit in order to meet his favourite movie star, everyone in the cinema inevitably chuckles, but beneath the thin veil of humour is a genuine disbelief and sadness that this is how millions of kids live every day. The great strength of this movie is that it doesn’t skirt around these issues like most Hollywood blockbusters do, but presents them in gritty and often graphic ways.

The great weakness of this movie is that it offers the same idealistic, but totally unsatisfying, answers as the shiny Hollywood movies. Not everyone from an Indian slum gets a chance to strike gold on a game show. In fact, one of the great controversies of the film was that it paid a miniscule wage to some of its slightly impoverished actors, and certainly only a small portion of its massive box-office takings to the low income people working on the film. Slumdog Millionaire was, in reality, a part of the problem it tried bring to light.

The problem is the selfishness and greed of the human heart. We need to be careful of this Hollywood idealism and realise that ‘luck’ and ‘honest work’ do not solve the problems. In the long run, only a new heart given by Christ can do that.