Critic wrangle: "Slumdog Millionaire."

By Alison Willmore on 11/12/2008

Half grimy portrait of Mumbai poverty, half fable by way of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," Danny Boyle's new film "Slumdog Millionaire" was a hit at Toronto, where it won the Audience Award, and is a solid candidate for a sleeper hit in the new "Juno" sense of the term, given that the film's from an established director and cost a reported $15 million (cheap!). Will it sleeper its way to an Oscar nomination? It's certainly edgily feel-good; as Manohla Dargis at the New York Times puts it, "this proves to be one of the most upbeat stories about living in hell imaginable." For her, the film's visual stunning if a little too calculating: "In the end, what gives me reluctant pause about this bright, cheery, hard-to-resist movie is that its joyfulness feels more like a filmmaker's calculation than an honest cry from the heart about the human spirit (or, better yet, a moral tale)." Andrew Sarris at the New York Observer finds that it's actually the mismatching of sentiments that makes it work, writing that it's "precisely because the varied parts don't cohere as smoothly as they are supposed to in the ideal well-made film."

"Is 'Slumdog Millionaire' gimmicky?" asks Andrew O'Hehir at Salon. "Sure it is, and in my judgment its dramatic and romantic elements -- as central as Boyle and Beaufoy may believe them -- are incidental. The real star of the film is not a person but a city, the vertiginous, exciting, massively overcrowded 'maximum city' of Mumbai." "It's like the Bollywood version of a Capra fable sprayed with colorful drops of dark-side-of-the-Third-World squalor," as Owen Gleiberman puts it at Entertainment Weekly. "Slumdog Millionaire rousingly celebrates the escape from the slums, but since it's Jamal's childhood that allows him to win big on TV (and to win that girl), you could also say that the movie ennobles poverty." "That destiny favors the pure-of-heart who are disadvantaged and romantic is an unabashedly mushy concept," counters Nick Schager at Slant, "and yet Boyle's direction is ecstatic, enthralled by the notion that kindness and generosity in the face of hardship have a way of paying dividends in the most unexpected, circuitous ways."

"Frankly, I don't trust Boyle; I feel the need to defend myself against a director for whom brutality and slickness are so inextricable," writes David Edelstein at New York. "But he's brilliant at what he does, at the kind of hyperkinetic, every-shot-a-grabber filmmaking that many attempt and few bring off." For Scott Foundas at the Village Voice, on the other hand, "it's that very tension between gritty, street-level reality and fairy-tale invention that ultimately makes Slumdog Millionaire feel even more buoyant and life-affirming."

Roger Ebert is ebullient, declaring that Boyle "combines the suspense of a game show with the vision and energy of 'City of God' and never stops sprinting."

On the nay side: Eric Hynes at indieWIRE doesn't buy it: "A goofy picaresque to rival 'Forrest Gump,' 'Slumdog Millionaire' has a similar power to please, shell-gaming the audience into emotionally investing in and celebrating its protagonist's dumb romanticism." And at the New York Press, Armond White, as one might have predicted, hates the film, snarling "There hasn't been a social drama this decadently over-hyped since City of God. Boyle plays the same game of pandering to liberal sensibilities while entertaining safe, middle-class distance," and signing off, catching, with "Boyle is a poverty pimp with an Avid."

[Photos: "Slumdog Millionaire," Fox Searchlight, 2008]