Slumdog Millionaire

Herald rating:

* * *

Verdict:

Undeniably entertaining but deeply phoney.

The Oscars' presumptive Best Picture is the kind of film that demands critical hyperbole because hyperbole is its native language: it is riotously kinetic, superbly shot, cleverly structured and irresistibly watchable.

It's a shame to say so, because the phrase will probably end up in the display ads, and there's something deeply phoney and condescending about this film. It begs to be interpreted as a soaring hymn to the indomitability of the human spirit but it offers us an India in which grimy reality is spit-shined.

Some reviewers have called the film Dickensian, but for all his romantic streak, particularly about women, that great documentarian never made poverty pretty. A slick song-and-dance number under the closing credits (don't miss it) is one of the best things about the movie because it is at least honest about its intentions: this is a glossy Bollywood-inflected spectacular, it concedes - theatrical, unrealistic, escapist.

There's nothing wrong with escapism at the movies, of course, but when lives of abject poverty are romanticised for the entertainment of the developed world, the price seems a bit steep.

As most people on the planet already know, it's the story of Jamal (Patel), an orphan from the Mumbai slums who works as a chai wallah (tea-boy) in a Mumbai call centre and is, when we meet him, one question away from winning the top prize on the Indian version of the television game show

Who Wants To be A Millionaire?

.

When filming stops the night before the fateful question - the central drama depends on depicting the show as live-to-air which it never is and never could be - he is being tortured by corrupt cops who suspect him of cheating. "What can a slumdog possibly know?" snarls one. "The answers," replies Jamal quietly.

The film then slips back and forth between the quiz show's studio and episodes in Jamal's 18 years of life. We learn that he is contesting for love, not money, and we discover that, as luck would have it, each question plugs into a grim moment in his horror-strewn past.

What is doubtless intended as a meditation on the nature of knowledge thus becomes a cheap trick: the film seeks to prove that misery can be good fortune. It's a secular restatement of the Beatitude about the poor inheriting the kingdom of Heaven, because what's at stake here is very earthly wealth. Either way, it seems to me, that idea is not so much romantic as reactionary.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Madhur Mittal, Anil Kapoor, Irrfan Khan

Director:

Danny Boyle

Running time:

115 mins

Rating:

R13 (violence & offensive language) In English and Hindi with English subtitles

Screening:

Berkeley, Bridgeway, Hoyts, Matakana, Rialto, SkyCity