Slumdog Millionaire: Deluded and Irresponsible
In Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, Jamal (Dev Patel) is a young man from the slums of Mumbai who is chosen at random to enter a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire-style contest on television. His tempestuous life experiences in the slum help him so completely with correctly solving the answers that his legitimacy is called into question. Jamal is promptly arrested by authorities hoping to expose him as a cheat; he is forced to explain in detail how he was able to answer each question. 
We follow Jamal on his journey through his past as he struggles to win the prize and safeguard his future.
Slumdog is one of those endless feel-good type films that purports to raise “awareness” and “encourage” the underdog. It tells the familiar story of the little engine that could, while simultaneously casting a blind eye to the material factors involved in actual revolution. One wonders if Boyle, a filmmaker with an at best uneven career, bothered to familiarize himself with basic revolutionary principles at all. All evidence points to the contrary. The message of Slumdog is clear: all it takes is luck, destiny, and courage to beat the system.
A film that thoroughly entertains while delivering an honest portrayal of class struggle – one that correctly communicates organization and the mass politicization of the working class as the true path towards revolution – would have been something. Instead, Slumdog is an irresponsible, deluded pipe dream where a peasant can rise above the dungheap of religious and class warfare through sheer individual strength and determination alone. As the current economic crisis deepens and sectors of the liberal/petty bourgeois media begin to rouse from years of self-imposed slumber, the ridiculous insanity of the film will be exposed.
Slumdog Millionaire, like its obsolete “message”, is dead on arrival.
January 20th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Interesting perspective, Jordan, and I’d have to say that I felt very much like this after watching Born Into Brothels, only that was a documentary and this wasn’t. It didn’t pretend to be, but it used documentary style elements in its narrative. This is a problem I get into when I respond strongly to the visuals. I wonder if anyone else has that issue.
January 21st, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Wow. Well, we shall agree to disagree. But you should also note that SLUMDOG wasn’t written by Boyle, but by Simon Beaufoy, he of THE FULL MONTY and MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY, so the feel good, Capra-esque vibe shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. And that is what this film is — a modern fable, a Bollywood Oliver Twist. And it should be taken that way. Is it absolutely realistic? No. And whether it’s revolutionary-appropriate or not, it does utterly capture the feeling of striving for something against great odds, which I’d say resonates on every corner of the globe.
Also, the screenplay is off of a novel by Vikas Swarup called Q & A. He grew up the elite son of lawyers, and wrote himself a pop novel based on what he saw but didn’t live. But the book has also been translated into 33 languages, was short listed for the Best First Book by the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, won South Africa’s Exclusive Books Boeke Prize, was aired as a BBC radio play which won the Gold Award for Best Drama at the Sony Radio Academy Awards, and was released on audiobook by Harper Collins and then won the award for Best Audio Book of the Year. I’d say declaring the message obsolete is a little quick.