Review: Slumdog Millionaire

The film starts off with a question, posed in the style of the show "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" It asks, "Jamal Malik is one question away from winning 20 million rupees. How did he do it?" The possible answers: He cheated, He's lucky, He's a genius, or It is written. The police have Jamal (Dev Patel) in custody, because they see things as they are: He serves tea to telemarketers, and has spent the majority of his life on the streets. They wonder, "What could a slumdog possibly know?"

As it turns out, everything.

You see, Jamal has been forced, ever since he was young, to survive on his wits and intelligence. This is familiar territory for director Danny Boyle, whose oeuvre includes other stories of the fight for survival like "28 Days Later" and "Trainspotting." The main difference between "Slumdog" and other films of his are that where the others were steeped in darkness before finding the light, there's a vibrant joy to this entire movie that no movie released this year, or even in the past few, can match.

That's not to say there's not darkness in it, though; the story follows Jamal and his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) throughout their lives as they try to stay afloat in Bombay, which as they get older becomes the industrial nirvana of Mumbai. Along the way, they lose their mother in an anti-Muslim riot, encounter a host of dangerous people and fall in and out of each others' lives. What keeps Jamal fighting through adversity time and time again is the lust for life instilled in him in the form of Latika (Freida Pinto), who he meets when they are children and who he spends his whole life trying to be with.

This relentless optimism serves Jamal well even when he makes it onto "Millionaire," especially with the host (Anil Kapoor) smugly playing Jamal's history for laughs. Jamal also refuses to indulge the police inspector (Irfan Khan) who believes strongly that Jamal is somehow cheating, and then fails to understand Jamal's motives for going on the show even when he becomes convinced that Jamal might just be telling the truth.

The film unfolds in flashbacks, as each question asked of Jamal on the show ties back to an event in his life. Boyle's visuals are unlike anything in his other films; gone are the monochromes and darknesses, replaced by an almost Bollywood-style splash of color. The entire film is shot in India, with many scenes populated by everyday citizens in lieu of extras. For this alone, Boyle deserves an Oscar; in interviews, he has talked about how he accepted things like people staring into the camera, as it was the truest way of showing the "real India" to a world that right now knows it more for being the site of brutal violence than anything else.

A story like this could have collapsed under the weight of treacly sentimentality, but it is a testament to cast, crew, writer and filmmaker alike that at no point in the two-hour running time does anything onscreen feel forced or unreal. In fact, more than anything, "Slumdog" might just be one of the truest love stories to come out in years, and it does it without a hint of grandstanding or obviousness. This might just be the year's best film.