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Arts \| Film \| Krisjan Lemmer

A million little pieces

SHAUN DE WAAL - Mar 06 2009 06:00

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I apologise for the spoiler or semi-spoiler ahead, but Slumdog Millionaire has been touted as a "feel-good" movie, and that means we have to address the issue of the ending.

Before we get to that, though, let us say that scriptwriter Simon Beaufoy and director Danny Boyle's adaptation of Vikas Swarup's acclaimed novel, Q&A, is gripping and touching. It sweeps one along in a rush of colour and incident, and contains a lovely lead performance from Dev Patel, who plays Jamal, a young man somehow able to come up with all the correct answers on a TV quiz show, India's version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

This televisual question-and-answer session is the frame for the story of Jamal's life, or at least it's the frame within the frame. The outer frame is his chat with a couple of policemen, showing how the questions and answers link with events in his life. It's a rather cosy chat for Jamal to have with two policemen who, in the opening moments of the film, are shown torturing him with routine viciousness.

Be that as it may, the Q&A structure for Jamal's story is a clever and effective one. It allows the viewer access to key moments in Jamal's life, from his slum childhood to his tangles with gangsters, his love for a particular girl, and the like. It also adds a layer of something like magic realism (or at least an element unexplained in rational terms) on top of the layer of ordinary realism.

That layer of ordinary realism, the bedrock of the storyline, is often a tale of appalling suffering. Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle manage to transform a world of deprivation and abuse into something whirling with life and colour; I suppose that's one way of looking at it. But is that not in some way to romanticise it? I'm not sure. It is certainly to narrativise it in ways that are compelling for more privileged moviegoers, even as we wince at some of the awful events with which we are regaled.

The tone of Slumdog Millionaire, likewise, is something other than one that wallows in suffering. We are thereby somewhat distanced from it, and perhaps that in some ways offers a paradigm for overcoming the suffering -- in "triumph of the human spirit" mode, though I've always thought that a meaningless phrase. The counterpoint to all the poverty and exploitation is the chance that Jamal will in fact become a millionaire if he answers all his questions correctly, and that means we have to be affected by the suffering in the first place, or we wouldn't invest emotionally in his winning the quiz.

It also means that we wouldn't be affected by the "feel-good" ending. For the film is certainly a feel-good film. After two hours of suffering, with only brief interludes of joy and one of bloody redemption, we're slapped with a happy resolution to the personal issues that have beset Jamal's life. Not a resolution to Third World poverty, exploitation or cruelty, though. No way of making good on all that suffering except for one individual's monetary and romantic dreams to come true. There's a glib kind of fatalism here. For a film about the Third World, Slumdog Millionaire has a very cute Hollywood ending: the boy gets the girl -- and that makes everything okay.

Admittedly, the filmmakers build up to this conclusion with exemplary skill. For a moment, one is taken in, and maybe I'm being over-sensitive about Third World suffering. After all, it's only a movie. Even Third World suffering should be susceptible to transformation by the factory of dreams, shouldn't it? Isn't that some form of redemption?

After that climactic romantic clinch, the credits roll over a Bollywood-style song-and-dance sequence that exhilaratingly exposes the romanticism and fantasy at the core of the film; in some ways, it's the movie's high point. Only on reflection do you realise that TV shows such as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? are not actually filmed live, so the use of that device in the film's ending is not really credible at all. Perhaps it's just magic realism.

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Comments

the parenthetic frame of the tone of the layers of unexplained magic realist counterpoint of which the article's delayed device which explains the film in terms of the fatalist transformation of bob loblaw...

the writing of this article is so clever it's hard to believe the author would find a happy ending so unsatisfying

Chris Allsobrook on March 7, 2009, 4:42 pm

The lives of people living in poverty are not the the horrible, depressing, no-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel hells that you want to see them portrayed as. Imagining - dreaming, etc. - is as essential to human life as it is to cinema. Why, just because we deal with real social problems in films like Slumdog and Tsotsi, do people who otherwise have a very good eye for film complain that they aren't being served up devastating docudrama? Do you really need to have your suspicion that you lead a terribly privileged life painfully confirmed to you every time poverty is portrayed in art? Slumdog is a morality tale; for me the most moving aspect of the film is how sensitive it is to the character of Salim, Jamal's brother, whose immorality actually facilitates his brother's moral seriousness. Your review is shallow and confused; you miss all the good bits. It seems that for you 'romanticising' poverty consists in leaving out the wailing violins and the BBC-voice narration. Allow the slum dwellers of the world some adventure, some dreaming, and a sumptuous Bollywood ending, and you will perhaps also allow yourself to stop being such a knee-jerk pseudo-liberal killjoy.

Scott Burnett on March 7, 2009, 7:35 pm

Not every movie has to be realistic, gloomy and depressing. It is for another movie-maker to showcase the slums and poverty and suffering of India, or Africa, or wherever, and s/he will do it well. But to burden a happy romatic fantasy with unrelenting realism seems to be missing the point. We read stories and see movies for different reasons and sometimes we do just want to feel good and be happy. Nothing wrong with that.

Adrienne Murray on March 9, 2009, 7:44 am

Reading you review I can't help but feel that you enjoyed the movie but just wanted to find something wrong with it. This films flies, it engrosses and pulsates into your heart. The point of film is to allow us to escape and remind us of how beautiful life and humanity can be regardless of the circumstances. Also, if the film enlightens even one mind to desperate situation in Mumbai slums then it has more than served it's purpose. Ignore this review and see a truly beautiful film, it will leave you humbled by how even the poorest of men can have the richest of souls. The film was never intended to be apolitical statement, so leave politics out of your review.

Tom Grindley-Ferris on March 9, 2009, 12:01 pm

I'll admitt I thought the writer unfair - until i saw it.

I loved the movie, but there was nothing - NOTHING "feelgood" about it. It felt like an intense drama; with a peculiar bollywood ending, one that glosses over truths in life and the silly audience will not be the wiser. Bollywood is what it is - but this story (until the end) was told so well, so real, (i cried when the little boy lost his eyes) because that is a truth that sends shivers done the spine. I loved the characters, the plot, the depth of indian life conveyed on screen, and it deserved every oscar. But to call it the "Feel-good movie of the decade" Are these people smoking crack. Anyway i suppose thats just my opinion. good review.

on March 20, 2009, 11:05 am

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A million little pieces

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