Already a multiple award winner, the critically lauded, box-office smash and Oscar front-runner Slumdog Millionaire looks certain to win the year’s big prize this Sunday night. Its momentum is quite simply unstoppable, and the Academy, who have seldom put edification before entertainment, is getting ready to preen itself for showing such inclusivity by elevating an independent film about ‘third-world’ poverty to history-book heights of success and acclaim. But anyone who watches on Sunday night should think closely about exactly what this film was trying to do and what it’s pretending to mean.
Simon Beaufoy and Danny Boyle’s film has, it should be said, picked up its fair share of criticism. From the controversy surrounding its release in India to its troublesome (to some) lack of realism, the film has angered many for reasons as various as its ‘exploitation’ of Mumbai slums to its manipulative marketing campaign that played down the more ‘brutal’ elements of the story. To a word that criticism seemed to me to miss the point.
Once you've accepted that the film is a fairy-story (we can't account for those who refuse this one demand), to criticise it as implausible or unrealistically life-affirming is facile. Indeed it is a successful film of this kind that twists hither thither the emotions of its audience - we should demand nothing less. Whatsmore all that criticism in India smacks of nothing more than sour grapes. Mumbai after all is the home of Bollywood, and the fact that a couple of Britishers have come over to film a story that might have been made with home-grown talent has clearly stuck in a few craws - imagine if Boyle and Beaufoy had used as their subject the slum kids of Orangi Town in Karachi, Pakistan - would they still have received all this criticism? The answer must be no.
I, like so many hundreds of thousands around the world went in un-swayed by these particular choruses of carping and with fresh eyes found myself swept away by Slumdog Millionaire: my disbelief was firmly switched off; I didn’t gripe; I allowed its tide of good-feeling, the most effective waves coming by way of nastiness, to wash over me; its vibrancy and colours hypnotised me; I desisted from criticising its petty and less than excellent elements; I left ennobled at the beauty and persistence of the human spirit. As was promised, I felt good.... but then something strange happened.
You’ll remember a scene in Hannah and her Sisters where Allen’s character leaves hospital following a barrage of tests that gave him the all clear for a suspected brain tumour. He bounds joyfully down the street clapping his hands with happiness and relief. But suddenly he stops, brings his hand to his mouth and reflects. The same thing happened to me after Slumdog Millionaire. I stopped dead in the street as jubilant fellow audience members jostled to get by, realising that something nasty had been quietly chucked in. I remembered back beyond the vibrant colours, the jaunty camera angles, the charming child-actors, the magisterial editing, the aesthetically acceptable social realism, and even Jamal’s successful quest for love. I suddenly remembered what that joy in the train station and that whole song-and-dance had so winningly distracted me from; I remembered that Jamal’s salvation, victory and reunion with his sweetheart was facilitated by a barely pre-considered act of wholly unexpected martyrdom on the part of his estranged brother. A brother in whom experience (those same experiences that went to form Jamal’s almost Platonic virtue) had festered, to produce a murderous and greedy monster with a cracked, corrupt soul. And while there should be nothing wrong with such archetypal or binary morality in a fairy-story, it bothered me because the filmmakers had smuggled in a peculiar motive for Salim's single virtuous act.
Boyle and Beaufoy have underestimated us. Modern cinemagoers have no problem swallowing narrative or character conceits whole. And so I am tempted to assume that there was something truly and deeply pernicious in showing us so brutishly and didactically teh bad brother's gradual embrace of religion before dying in a hail of bullets, in a bath inexplicably filled with money (a rejection of material ambitions, perhaps?), with the words ‘God is great’ on his lips.
Of course it should come as no surprise that Hollywood royalty is so readily seduced by such suggestions of profundity. As is evidenced year-in-year-out when comedies (and The Dark Knight this year) are all but ignored in favour of monstrous and pompous big-budget prize-bait, the Academy likes to take itself very seriously. And yet I wonder why this deeper aspect of the story hasn’t been more broadly discussed. While widespread analysis of fellow Best Film nominee The Reader has seen many notable commentators find the time to roundly criticise its appropriation of gigantic moral-themes for the sake of middle-brow erotic titillation I can’t find a single one who’s commented on this nasty twist in Slumdog Millionaire’s tale: this absurd suggestion that a life-time’s wickedness can be redeemed by a single self-sacrificing deed had no place whatsoever within the system of (albeit) superficial moral absolutes that Boyle and Beaufoy had so daringly established; nor was the vapid introduction of religious themes and pseudo-religious imagery justified in a film whose social-realism is never anything more than skin-deep. (N.B. My troubles with this would be no greater or lesser if the character had turned to Catholicism, Judaism or Zoroastrianism rather than Islam.)
These themes, only ever half-examined and recklessly thrown in to bulk out a fundamentally silly story, are precisely the reasons why Slumdog shouldn’t win the Oscar. Of course, they are also - both predictably and paradoxically - the very reasons it will!
SL
