CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
Profile continued . . .

ARCHIVES!
Review of Slumdog Millionaire

Thursday, June 25, 2009

this entry brought to you by m.i.a, "paper planes"-- i actually don't care for that song, but it was basically repeating in my head the entire time as i wrote this.





Slumdog Millionaire was one of those movies that seemed to explode on the scene apropos of nothing. When Benjamin Button was released, it was clear and away the closest contender to winning the Oscar for Best Picture, and when the nominations were announced, it took in the record for the year of most nominations. But by that time, the buzz on Slumdog Millionaire had ballooned to gigantic proportions, and, out of nowhere, it became the movie to beat for Best Picture. And to be clear, I enjoyed the film a lot. Yet when the movie was done, the more I thought about it, the more little things that had been bothering me through the film grew.

The movie takes place during three different time periods, starting off in the present and, during flashbacks, going through main character Jamal's childhood growing up in the most wretched of Mumbai slums, as a teen escaping out of the untouchable class and becoming street hustlers, and as an adult, a bottom-rung lackey at a call center trying to win the affections of his childhood love by getting on "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire". One of my bigger gripes, however, is that aside from Jamal, there was no effort to cast the supporting characters with any sort of continuity concerning growth. The child that plays Salim looks nothing like the teen who plays Salim who looks absolutely nothing like the adult who plays Salim. But the worst is Latika, who goes from beautiful little Indian girl with a dark complexion and exotic, ethnic features (especially during her brief on-screen time as a teen) to a light skinned, homogenized looking model as an adult. This seems like a small thing to complain about, but imagine a movie set up in the slums of America, where throughout a little girl's life on film, she is played by a beautiful little black girl with a very dark complexion, very afro-centric features, and natural, somewhat ratty hair, who then grows up to be Rosario Dawson. There's nothing wrong with Rosario Dawson, in fact, I think she's adorable, but it would be distracting, to say the least. This was a problem for me in Slumdog Millionaire. There was never a point in time where I believed any of the children would grow up to be any of the other actors in the movie, and the radical shift from ethnic girl to Americanized Indian Girl seemed cheap and Hollywood.

I also had a problem with the contrivances most of the movie is hinged on. I realize this was done on purpose-- Slumdog Millionaire is meant to be a fairy tale for Western audiences but through the lens of the ghettos in India, so when Jamal is sweating it out through the questions on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and we cut to the portion of his life where he, coincidentally, found the answer, there's never a point where the movie pretends to try to be subtle. But after a while it seemed forced and didn't come up as naturally as I felt it could-- it was if the writers wrote the boy's life story around real "Millionaire" questions, rather than fleshing out the boy's story and then coming up with questions that would be relevant. There's a question as to what a particular Hindi god is holding, and we get a flashback to a riot where the main characters must scatter to survive, and in the ensuing chaos, Jamal runs into a little boy inexplicably dressed up as exactly that Hindi god, when no other person in the crowd is in costume. What exactly just happened? Was it a vision? Or did he really see a child dressed up, and if so, how and why? None of that matters, though, what matters is he got a good look at what he was holding, so that question is easily answered. I also found Jamals' torture at the beginning of the movie to be incongruous. They torture him as if he were a suspected of the Mumbai bombings or locked up in Abu Ghraib, yet once it's all said and done it doesn't really seem that big of a deal to any of the characters involved. By the last act the boy and his torturers shoot the shit as if he'd strolled in voluntarily and they had nothing better to do but chat.

I think my real problem with Slumdog Millionaire is that I'd already seen City of God. That movie takes place in Rio De Janeiro rather than Mumbai, but it essentially tells the same story. They both have to do with two young boys growing up in hell, and both diverging into different paths, one growing up productive, the other growing up reveling in violence, and both movies attempt to tell their stories utterly unflinchingly. Yet City of God seemed completely untainted by Hollywood and Hollywood-isms, and completely avoided the problems Slumdog Millionaire has. It was more honest and more candid, and, in the end, had a strong thematic message other than "These two lovers were destined by fate", which Slumdog revels in. Yet despite these complaints, I did like Slumdog a lot. It was well acted by a cast of entirely unknowns who, hopefully, will have continue to have a strong career in Hollywood, and Danny Boyle directs with such a stylish and swift eye it's impossible to not get caught up in it (although I preferred Benjamin Button's lush, ponderous directing). I definitely felt that this was a great movie worth watching, and I get the critical buzz-- it's a feel good movie and is utterly unpretentious. But Best Picture and Best Director? I don't really agree.
------



with love from CRS @ 8:02 AM 

0 Comments:

Post a Comment