There are already a lot of reviews of this one out there, so I'll keep this brief. I think director Danny Boyle put it best when he introduced the film at this year's Austin Film Festival saying "I never expected to be this thrilled by a script about Who Wants to be a Millionaire." The truth is, it is and is not about that show that has long become passe in the States. What it is really designed to get at is the very real diametric difference between classes that is so invisible to people worldwide in so-called industrial nations. The movie's plot follows a nobody guy named Jamal who gets to the next to last question in the Indian Who Wants to be a Millionaire and is accused of fraud.
The idea of human beings no longer being considered a commodity, or "property" is a joke. Some of the outright depraved things that happen to Jamal and those around him are just brutal on the senses, but things lighten up as you go along. I've spoken to friends (all Americans) who've seen it and their opinion of this guy's rough childhood is that "it's a bit much, you know. Hard to believe, lays it on thick, etc." with a twinge of high thread-counting, liberal elitism in their voice every time. Here's the thing: shit like this happens in India and other countries all the time. Even though it was half a century ago, my dad can tell comparable stories from his childhood in Cuba. Unlike the States, things haven't changed to a great degree in terms of human conditions since Castro took power.
To some extent, what happens to Jamal in the course of the film's full-meal 120 minutes is heightened-reality, once in a century stuff, but through the new lens a lot of people have after the election of Barack Obama, it's now much less of a stretch to consider this movie about long-shot hope completely plausible. No one knew who Jamal was, and now he's the hope of a nation. Sound familiar?
I fell pretty hard for the movie when I saw it in mid-October, and I've grown more fond of it since then. This is a movie people should take a gang of ten friends to, and catch Quantum of Solace a couple weeks from now when the crowds die down. This is the kind of movie people will purchase on DVD so that every once in a while they can show it to friends.
One of the interesting things that came out of the post-show Q&A however many weeks ago was that originally Warner Independent Pictures (WIP) had picked it up, and then all of a sudden there was no WIP anymore. I lament the fact that this movie may have stalled on its way to release, and am very glad it's beginning to open across the coutry this week. This is Danny Boyle's best work both cinematically and socio-politically. If the "on for me, one for you" formula stays true to Boyle, we'll get one of his "Slumdog" movies and one of his genre movies one after the other for some time to come.