Mansur Ahmed

Slumdog Millionaire is a miracle. It unfolds before your eyes with breathtaking sweep and bravura filmmaking that engulfs you in sadness, human indecency, violence, beauty, spiritual epiphany, redemption, passion, sensitivity, human decency, and ultimately, emotional upliftment in the space of two hours. If you have no context of the film at the start, your sensibilities will be overrun with intense ardor by the end. I had never even heard of the novel Q and A by Vikas Swarup when I first learned of Slumdog Millionaire, and the premise about a street urchin who gets a spot on the Indian Who Wants to be a Millionaire immediately disinterested me, but that description is an utmost simplification. The game show is a plot device, a surprisingly brilliant one at that, but the heart of the movie is our hero named Jamal and the human connections he embraces, sometimes desperately, to find meaning in his life. It can be gut wrenching at times, and despite the ending, you will remain disturbed by the tumultuousness that drowns Jamal throughout his unsympathetic existence, especially when you consider his experiences are a reality to so many people in the world without the catharsis of love for another human being. It consumes him and fuels his unyielding spirit until fate itself recognizes how wrong it is to pile so much sorrow onto a person with the capacity for such pure, truthful devotedness to his own feelings, yet alone the girl of his dreams.

For a brief time, before anyone knows what happens in the end, she was not the girl of his dreams, but of his reality. I’m not going to tell you any of the events in the movie, I’ve already given away too much as it is, but I will tell you how staggering it is to realize the simplicity of the narrative, yet how complex the structure is. I think Simon Beaufoy and Danny Boyle, who wrote and directed respectively, both deserve an Oscar and every other award for writing and directing. The actors also deserve accolades, particularly the children actors who portray Jamal in his younger days. Dev Patel, who plays Jamal in the present, is in another league of his own. His eyes express harrowing depth. His composure and the way he interacts with scoundrels of all walks will send spasms of woe through your body. You sit in your comfortable movie theater seat and watch as so many individuals, even the ones he is entitled to trust, inflict relentless cruelty unto him. Jamal knows his status in the world, and has been spit on so much that he is left nary a human being. Nonetheless, his humanity cannot be destroyed.

I keep remembering Dev Patel’s eyes. He is only eighteen years old, but his eyes are like the eyes of an old man, wearied eyes, sad eyes. I’m speaking of the actor here, but Boyle makes his eyes an asset by focusing the camera on him in instances where Jamal is looking at the outside world with a kind of insecure timidity. He is fragile and afraid, particularly intimidated while sitting across from the game show host who is always degradingly questioning his merit as a person by joking about his status as a slumdog tea fellow. Even though you can sense his vulnerability, there must be intermittent twinkles of bravery within Jamal, preventing himself from allowing determent to overtake his constitution. I’ve seen the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and whenever a contestant reaches a high point in the game, the host will get out of his seat to begin dancing in a moment of ludicrous celebration. He invites the contestant onto the floor and he or she usually follows suit, themselves becoming inundated with self importance. When this happens in Slumdog Millionaire, Dev Patel has a poignant smile on his face, confused and sheepish about whether or not his triumph, the triumph of a slumdog, is worthy of celebrating. He watches the host dance before him with a quiet dignity.

Back to those child actors now. I don’t know what it is, but sometimes I feel children convey this raw truthfulness about life most adults are unable to fathom. Maybe its because they have no other frame of reference, and they have fewer outlets to define or express their needs clearly, but the isolation and loneliness of existence comes out with more honesty in children. It isn’t watered down by ego or fabricated pridefulness. There is a particular scene when Jamal is being gravely injusticed by someone he would never come to expect it from, and the confusion expressed by the actor who plays Young Jamal, Tanay Chheda, is so agonizing that I began to twist in my seat. Boyle and Beaufoy also deeply explore the lives of street children, depicting the sense of community that exists within the slums of India, and the great evils that exploiters will effortlessly unleash after winning over their trust with false security. This a very bold film. It illustrates situations for us that illuminate the cold indifference of whatever laws govern our being. It dispirits us and breaks our hearts to the point we feign hopelessness, but then seamlessly builds to its conclusion, reaffirming us and absolving the very hopelessness it conjures. You can sort of anticipate how things will transpire, but the ending is still a surprise. It doesn’t surprise you with melodramatic revelations, its surprise ending is in how you unexpectedly feel.