I saw Slumdog Millionaire back in November and now that it just won several Golden Globes, I suppose I should write my review.

No one is ever going to fault director Danny Boyle for making boring films. His movies brim with energy while never flinching from the harshness of life. Boyle makes movies in the same vivacious stream as Baz Luhrmann and Martin Scorcese. All three directors make highly charged films shot with fervency, edited so that the pace never slows from a sprint, and that use music as another plot-driving device. Boyle’s latest film, Slumdog Millionaire is a Dickensian story of Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), an orphan who grows up in the slums of Bombay (later Mumbai). The story follows Jamal, his brother Salim, and their fellow orphan Latika through three periods of their young lives. We meet Jamal as a contestant on the Indian version of the game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? As Jamal progresses through the questions, the show’s producers suspect that he is somehow cheating since they believe an uneducated slumdog could have no way of knowing the answers to all these questions. His interrogation by the local police inspector (Irrfan Khan, who gives another excellent performance after The Darjeeling Limited and A Mighty Heart) allows Jamal to tell the details of his hard life from his early youth to the time on the show, when he is eighteen and working as a tea-gofer at a telecommunications firm.

Slumdog Millionaire neither sensationalizes nor downplays the realities of the slums — the lack of potable water or adequate sewage treatment, the tight proximity of people living together, the exploitation of the poor. But this film is a fairy tale and what keeps it from being an expose about slum life is the unlikely story of someone escaping poverty via a television game show. What keeps it from being schmaltzy, however, are the characters and how they survive their harsh realities. Jamal is a scrapper and survivor. We see this is true from his earliest days, when as a five-year-old, he goes through horrible travails to secure the autograph of a popular actor who visits their slum. (This early scene establishes the relationship between Jamal and his brother Salim.) When Latika, a little orphan girl joins them, they form a triumvirate of survival. Jamal never loses his romanticism whereas Salim opts for a more cynical route, falling in with gangsters and violence as the only means to escape the radical poverty. Salim does not want to escape the slums, but to rule them. Latika ends up somewhere between the two brothers.

I called the film Dickensian and anyone familiar with how Charles Dickens treated class issues in his time will be able to sniff his influence on this story within the first five minutes. On the surface, the story follows the pattern of humanizing the poor found in Dickens’ work. We know the set up in squalor, the struggles to survive, the romanticism of the heroes, and the sacrifices to rise above the pain. What keeps this film from entering the sentimentalism of Dickens’ predictable conclusions are the specifics of Indian life Boyle draws out. He filmed in real slums in Mumbai. Jamal suffers an emotional beating from the host of the game show and the reasons for it go beyond than merely Jamal being from the slums. Jamal is a Muslim in a predominantly Hindu culture with a caste system that locks people into a socio-economic class and there is little if any hope for moving out of that class. When Jamal needs a lifeline for the second question of the show — naming the official slogan of the nation of India — he is mocked for not knowing something a five-year-old would know. We see that while Jamal is a citizen of India, he is not a part of India. His caste, his economic realities push him to the margins of society. Why would he care about India when India does not care about him? The film does not preach at us, but it neither avoids the reality of religious hatred.

While Slumdog Millionaire comes across as a testament to the power of life and love, to the power of belief and destiny in the midst of suffocating oppression, the movie’s hope for redemption lies in money. True, Jamal’s and Latika’s spirits are never broken and we see hope in their willingness to never give up on each other, but their greatest hope comes in Jamal winning so much money that he will never have to enter the slums again. As Jamal progresses on the game show, we see scenes of his slum-dwelling neighbors cheering him on, as one of them. In the end, he succeeds in leaving the slums and his neighbors behind. It is a strange ending in which only Jamal’s and Latika’s lives are transformed. Then the film ends as any Bollywood fairy tale should: with a dance number.

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