The Oscars are on this Sunday, and although I've only seen two of the five Best Picture nominees (and don't have a whole lot of respect for the Academy), I really want to talk about the movie I feel should win (even though I haven't seen three of the nominees). When Slumdog Millionaire first started getting a lot of good press, I was intrigued as to how a movie about Who Wants To Be A Millioniare could possibly be so good. But more and more people praised it and I learned that it was more about growing up as a poor child in India. Still, I was unsure of what I was getting myself into when I saw it. I'm so happy I took the chance...
Slumdog is definitely a fairy tale in the sense that the gameshow element is very fantastical. But the gameshow was barely more than a frame for the tale of a young "slumdog" in Mumbai, India. Jamal Malik was born into poverty, and he was a Muslim in a nation of Hindus that hated him and his religion. So when he got to the $1 million question (or 20 million rupee question) on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, the host came to the only logical conclusion: he cheated. After all, how could a boy from the slums who had almost no schooling possibly get that far? Doctors, lawyers, and scholars barely made it 3/4ths of the way through the questions, so Jamal had to cheat... right?
He and his brother Salim had to figure out how to live on their own after a Hindu mob killed their mother. The two of them lived on the street, scammed tourists at the Taj Mahal, and worked for a group of people similar to Fagan from Olvier Twist; they picked pockets and begged for money, then turned it over to their "caregivers". And as Jamal grew up, various noteworthy moments in his life supplied him with the information that gave him the answers for the show. When he was running from the mob that killed his mother, he saw a boy dressed as a Hindu god, and the image stuck with him. When a question asked him what item that god was traditionally depicted carrying, Jamal knew the answer.
Jamal and Salim meet a young girl named Latika, and Jamal falls in love with her. As happens in many fairy tales, Jamal and Latika are kept apart by various twists of fate, and Jamal makes it his mission to always be reunited with her, even if he has to overcome insurmountable odds. When he learns that she likes to watch Millionaire, he goes on the show, hoping beyond all hope that she would be watching.
Latika explains that for many people in India, Millionaire is an escapist fantasy; the idea that someone can turn their life around in one night is too good an opportunity to pass up, and viewers want to live the contestants' dreams vicariously. The same holds true for the viewers of the movie; we like love stories because we want to feel like something like that could happen to us. We want to overcome impossible odds to be with the person we believe we are meant to be with.
Slumdog also has a kind of twisted beauty to it in the scenes of poverty. Watching Jamal, Salim, and Latika put up with the various trials of living in such deplorable conditions is mostly horrifying, but we keep believing that there will be something better out there. Also, they are poor in some very beautiful places. The Taj Mahal is a lone landmark of wealth, and even the slums had a kind of beauty of decay thing going.
If you haven't seen this movie yet, do so as soon as possible. I don't think I've yet met a person who has disliked it (and one person I know who loved it went into it believing she would hate it).
Up next: Sexual healing...
No comments:
Post a Comment