Author: Matthew Schneeberger
Publication: Rediff.com
Date: January 29, 2009
URL: http://www.rediff.com/movies/2009/jan/29is-slumdog-worth-it.htm
Sitting inside a crowded movie theatre in
Nariman Point, South Mumbai, surrounded by other pasty-skinned foreigners
and a few overtly wealthy Indians, I was forced to stifle an audible groan.
"What will we survive on, Jamal?" Freida Pinto had asked.
"Love," Dev Patel had replied.
Enough was enough. For an hour and a half
(and for Rs 250), I had watched a right proper Brit and a middle-class Mumbaikar
stumble through cheesy dialogue, all the while pretending to represent the
Mumbai slums.
'It's official,' I thought. 'Slumdog Millionaire
is massively disappointing. It's inauthentic and vain. And it's making a mockery
of Hollywood's annual awards season.'
The realisation saddened me because I tried
hard to like the film. Desperately, in fact. From the moment I had first heard
of acclaimed director Danny Boyle's plan to shoot a movie in India, I positively
swooned.
'My India, my Mumbai, no longer a crude caricature!'
I had gushed. 'The world will finally see her as she is!'
I told all within earshot how badly I wanted
to see Boyle's masterpiece. I made a Slumdog Millionaire poster my desktop
computer's wallpaper and compulsively watched and re-watched the film's two
minute trailer.
During the horror of 26/11, while Western
film critics instructed the laity to 'see Slumdog Millionaire in order to
better understand this benighted Asian metropolis', I consoled myself by conjuring
up images of packed American theatres, where attentive US movie-goers could
receive a genuine taste of Mumbai.
So when Indian friends pronounced themselves
'woefully underwhelmed' with the 'overrated' film, I dismissed their opinions
and instead turned to glowing reviews in the Chicago Tribune, the Wall Street
Journal and others.
"Ingrates," I secretly said of Slumdog's
Indian critics. "Finally, someone has shown you the heart of your own
city, the city you thought you knew. How dare you pass judgement! See the
steady stream of awards? The four Golden Globes? Pick up a copy of the New
York Times and read what Danny Boyle has done for you!"
In the months leading up to Slumdog's India
release, I continued to describe it in only the most flattering of terms:
'the ultimate underdog film', a 'mad-cap, life-affirming tour of modern India',
'Danny Boyle's Ode to Mumbai' and a 'high-paced primer on life in Asia's largest
slum'.
And, despite the temptation of easy available
pirated DVDs, I waited for the official India release, hoping for the full
'movie-going' experience. I was prepared to be blown away. Really and truly,
ready for blast-off.
But, from the start, during the torture scene,
which itself was painful to watch, something didn't feel right. Maybe unrealistic
expectations had siphoned away my enjoyment. But countless times before I
had entered a movie theatre with high expectations, yet left completely satisfied.
Maybe living in India had dulled some of Slumdog's
romance. But I know a Delhi-based German expat who calls it the 'greatest
film ever made'. It's just that, ultimately, I found Slumdog Millionaire to
be decidedly average. An earnest, talented outsider's cursory glance at Mumbai
slum-life. But the best film of 2008? Worthy of all the awards and accolades
that Hollywood has to offer? Hardly.
And why in the world has Simon Beaufoy been
award for best screenplay? It's terrible, worse than bad, more full of holes
than a block of Swiss cheese.
Some argue that it's not a documentary, just
a movie. I understand. My complaints with the screenplay have nothing to do
with the coincidences or the question-and-answer inspired flashbacks. Those
were cute. They drove the story. They were digestible.
It was the absurdity of slum-kids knowing
all about Samuel Colt, the completely inauthentic (and clichéd) call-centre
scenes, the bizarrely callous game show host, the indifferent studio audience,
the implausibility of a hardened Mumbai gangster asking for a sandwich, the
doubtful CST rendezvous (Ever seen CST at 5 pm? The phrase 'needle in a haystack'
comes to mind), the ubiquitous Queen's English, the improbability of a fully-clad
mini-Ram ready to wage war on Mumbai's Muslims. But, most of all, it was the
disastrous performance of the lead actor, Dev Patel.
For starters, his Jamal couldn't be any more
British if he tried. Apparently, having brown skin was the only pre-requisite
for taking on the role. Never mind the accent. What resulted, naturally, was
a completely unbelievable character. Every single thing he did rang hollow:
every piece of dialogue, every bit of action, everything. Let's be honest.
Dev Patel wouldn't last five minutes in a Mumbai slum.
And to those of us half-way acquainted with
the city's seedier side, Patel's naivete dragged down the movie, and was annoyingly
bothersome throughout, like a broken tooth.
I found it impossible to feel emotionally
invested with the main characters. All the way up to the final kiss, I truly
did not care what happened to Jamal or to Latika. And I'm as sentimental and
sappy as the next guy. It's just that this love story didn't work.
That's not to say that Danny Boyle achieved
nothing here: the shots are interesting, the action frenetic, the soundtrack
masterfully married to the narrative, and so on. Plus, in many ways, I respect
what the film unveiled by peeling back Mumbai's epidermis and peering inside.
Yes, despite what the most zealous of naysayers
claim, India's problems are real and manifold: extreme poverty, communal violence,
child beggary, painful vestiges of the caste system, to name a few. And all
of these exist even in modern, urban India, the India of all those Western
magazines profiles, the India of business process outsourcing and information
technology.
So it's good that someone has held up a mirror
to remind India that, yes, you've come far, but that you have a long way to
go, too.
Still, these are weighty, charged issues,
perhaps best not hastily reproduced and distilled by a mere passer-by. Boyle
readily admits he has no great knowledge of, intimacy with or insight into
India, though today he's quite complimentary of the city so responsible for
his recent fortune.
Before seeing the movie, I thought those who
claimed that it portrayed India in a negative light were being ridiculously
defensive. Having seen it, I understand where they are coming from. Yes, Mumbai
has squalor and violence and cruelty. But it has great humanity and brotherhood
and character, none of which were adequately represented in the film.
One of the first negative reviews of Slumdog
I read was from the blog The Great Bong, who absolutely lacerated it. In it,
the blogger wrote, "Well yes these things do happen in India. However
the problem is when you show every hellish thing possible all happening to
the same person. Then it stretches reason and believability and just looks
like you are packing in every negative thing that Westerners perceive about
India for the sake of crowd pleasing."
He goes on to propose a film about an outlandish
string of events happening to an African-American boy in the US, and says,
"Even though each of these incidents have actually happened in the United
States of America, I would be accused of spinning a fantastic yarn that has
no grounding in reality, that has no connection to the 'American experience'
and my motivations would be questioned, no matter how cinematically spectacular
I made my movie. At the very least, I wouldn't be on 94 percent on Tomatometer
and a strong Oscar favourite."
He's right. Say an Indian director travelled
to New Orleans for a few months to film a movie about Jamal Martin, an impoverished
African American who lost his home in Hurricane Katrina, who once had a promising
basketball career, but who -- following a drive-by shooting -- now walks with
a permanent limp, whose father is in jail for selling drugs, whose mother
is addicted to crack cocaine, whose younger sister was killed by gang-violence,
whose brother was arrested by corrupt cops, whose first born child has sickle
cell anaemia, and so on. The movie would be widely panned and laughed out
of theatres.
That, to me, is Slumdog Millionaire: contrived,
pretentious, absurd, hollow, inauthentic, a pseudo-statement about social
justice. And yet today the film stands on the precipice of Hollywood's highest
honour, the Academy Award for Best Picture.
For me, the only authentic aspects of the
film were the Hindi-driven dialogue and the acting of the slum children, which
worked to make the entire slick package palatable.
As for the much ballyhooed end-credit Bollywood
number, I left before they finished dancing.
I had seen enough.
