BOYLE GOES SLUMMING
dir: Danny Boyle
starring: Dev Patel, Frieda Pinto, Irfan Khan
Danny Boyle is, his CV would suggest, a director with the filmmaking equivalent of ADHD. From the darkly comic thriller Shallow Grave to the rom-com on the run A Life Less Ordinary and the post-apocalyptic horror 28 Days Layer, he is constantly jumping with gleeful energy from one genre to the next, never allowing himself to make the same film twice. So it shouldn’t have really come as a surprise that he chose to make his newest project about “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”. Not only that, but the Indian version.
Jamal Malik (played in his adolescent incarnation by Skins’ Dev Patel) is accused of cheating when he is one question away from winning the jackpot on the show, and must explain to the police how he came to know the seemingly random answers – which, of course, lie in his past as an orphaned street urchin living in the slums of Mumbai. The story jumps back-and-forth between the investigation, the quiz show, and a series of vignettes set in Jamal’s childhood. From there, there’s some stuff about destiny and True Love conquering all, but that is besides the point. Danny Boyle has never allowed his films to be dominated by story, which may possibly explain his inconsistent filmography, which is as shaky as the camera he uses to excitably chase his actors around with. For each hit he makes such as Trainspotting, he has a misjudged flop like The Beach up his sleeve, but the throughline of his career has been the energy, and Slumdog is no different.
As usual, Boyle directs with a hyper-kinetic, foot-stomping vitality and at first you’ll be glad to come along for the ride. With so much happening on screen, you won’t notice the limited emotional range of his actors, hidden behind the frenzied editing and vividly saturated colours of the cinematography. However, after a while, “frenzied” becomes “exhausting”, “vividy saturated” becomes “garish” and the weaknesses of Simon Beaufoy’s (The Full Monty) uneven screenplay become glaringly obvious. For with the gimmicky narrative hook determining the focus of the film, rather than the characters, this is one film where the story is the star, not Boyle’s directing, and this is where it all starts to fall apart.
The constant flashbacks for each question (which, by a wild coincidence, when taken in order correspond chronologically with traumas in Jamal’s young life) leads to the movie unfolding in a stop-and-start fashion that kills any suspense and robs the film of the energy that Boyle heroically tries to maintain for its entirety and ultimately become distracting. As these episodic vignettes become more and more repetitive (yes, we understand, growing up as an orphan in the slums was horrific, although the excitement and vitality that Danny Boyle has clearly found in Mumbai seems to be at odds with this message) they become a distraction from the quiz show element of the film, which becomes the most interesting of the many plots. Will Jamal win? What will happen if he does? And has it been rigged by the suspicious-looking host (you can’t imagine Chris Tarrant acting so horribly to one of the English contestants)? Not that any of these questions matter, of course, as we are told from the beginning of the film that Jamal’s destiny “is written”. Nothing the audience feels and no plot obstacle dreamed up could possibly alter it, making any kind of interest we have in rooting for our protagonist to overcome the odds ultimately redundant.
Never losing his eye for the cinematic, Boyle ends with a clever, well-judged homage to the Bollywood movies that surely inspired him throughout the making of the film, but by the time the finale comes around, you’ll be so worn out and fatigued it’s just more white noise you feel you need sit through lest you miss the one vital moment that reveals the answer to the most important question at the heart of Slumdog Millionaire – why everyone seems to have fallen in love with this film.
VERDICT: ** out of *****
