Slumdog Millionaire

On Tuesday afternoon I took the two-lane back roads through the towns of Harvard and Bolton, then jumped on the Interstate for a couple miles until I got to the Solomon Pond Mall just west of Marlboro.

Being the anti-fascist type, I strive to go to as many independent movie houses as possible. One benefit is that they tend to be quirky, unique in their own particular way. Corporate multiplexes in a mall have their own variations, but you have to make a specific attempt to appreciate them.

The cineplex at Solomon Pond Mall is owned by Regal Entertainment Group, the largest theater chain in the nation. Over the weekend I had been reading about Regal in connection with the brand new appointed U.S. Senator from Colorado, Michael Bennet. Among other things, he had put together the deal that created Regal from several other debt-swamped chains owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz. Many liberal bloggers were scratching their heads over Bennet's appointment, calling him a "millionaire's candidate." But I guess there weren't enough Yale law school graduates in the Senate right now, so they needed another one to speak for the Centennial State, one who has lived there for only a decade. Welcome to 2009.

Bennet is nearly my same age. I couldn't help think that in some alternative universe, this appointment would have gone to a friend and high school classmate of mine, one who we all thought we be governor or senator, but who has cut most of the people out of his life who once knew him and believed in him.

The Solomon Pond Mall is quite a consumer mecca in this part of Massachusetts. I'd been there just before Christmas with my sister and her family, when we'd seen Bolt. Needless to say, there were quite a few more empty spots in the parking lot this time. I left my car amidst a sea of asphalt surrounded by towering ranges of plowed snow and walked into the lobby of the Anschutz movie palace. I plunked down seven dollars and seventy-five cents in cash for the matinee. If the billionaire wants my personal data, he needs to give me a bigger afternoon discount.

There was a smattering of people in the auditorium---one of those stadium types with a steep pitch. To my annoyance, a trio of high school girls decided to sit in my row, only one seat away from me. Have I not cultivated the grumpy old man image well enough?

When Slumdog Millionaire finally started, I settled in for what I figured to be two hours of fun entertainment. I was a bit skeptical, however, from all the hyper-glowing reviews about how this was one of the best, if not the best, movie of the year. Such publicity makes me defensive in a slightly passive-aggressive sort of way.

For the most part, I enjoyed the movie and had a fun time watching the story unfold. As you probably know, even if you haven't seen the movie, the story involves a young orphaned man who grew up in the slums and streets of Bombay/Mumbai, and who gets to appear as a contestant on India's version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." At the movie opens, he is one question away from the grand prize, and he is being interrogated by the police on charges of possible fraud. As he explains himself to police, we get to see his entire life story up to the moment he goes on the show.

About halfway through I began to wrestle in my mind with the various story-related issues. The question that most intrigued me was: how would the same biographical story work without the framing story of the game show? That is, if you just told the story of his life in linear time, what kind of movie would it be?

It occurred to me that in such a case, the movie would become a standard and somewhat bland retelling of the same kind of deprived third world childhood stories we have seen since the days of Italian postwar neorealism. It would be one of those quiet sentimental foreign movies that "touches your heart" and that comes and goes from art theaters in a week.

This realization made me suspect the gag of the game show framing plot as being too much of a superficial gloss. This realization itself was not necessarily a bad thing, since the plot itself is driven by a similar suspicion, namely that the young man is cheating. Thus we have a narrative-level mirror to the question of whether or not the movie itself is a cheat.

Slumdog is obviously meant to be a parable about the rise of contemporary India. The character goes from scrounging in a garbage dump to working in a modern call center. Was the movie suggesting that this new incarnation of India was itself somehow phony?

In the end, I do not think it was clever enough to grapple with an answer to this half-intended question. Or if it was, it threw in the towel, completely wrapping itself in the fantasy premise of the framing story and its fairy-tale climax. There's nothing inherently wrong with that from a story point-of-view, but it makes the movie significantly less powerful as a social statement than it could have been. The thematic level of the movie, which could have stayed on the high level of the nation itself, seemed to degrade in the end to "the power of true love, faith, and destiny."

The biggest flaw in the movie is the essential passiveness of the main character, who makes few critical decisions in his life, but simply floats through much of the story as if observing it. As a protagonist, he is a weak symbol of the nation.

One can argue that the actual hidden protagonist of the movie is the main character's older brother, Salim, who lives out a more reality-based version of what happens to children who grow up in the garbage heaps of Mumbai. His narrative is the real narrative of the movie, and his fate is the real climax, one that we unfortunately hardly notice, as it plays out soundlessly as a sideshow to climax of the game show framing story and its Bollywood epilogue.

I won't deny that this movie made me think about India deeply, but its lack of narrative power based on its indulgence in the fairy tale aspect, the passiveness of the main character, and its whitewash of the actual underlying narrative, all rendered it less than fully aware of its own artistic messages. It's still a good film in many ways, to be sure, and it was great fun to watch it. I wouldn't discourage anyone from going to see it, so long as you like fairy tales. But best movie of 2008? My final answer is no way.