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.