SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE - A (Very Personal) Film Review

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, which we saw yesterday afternoon at the Century Theater in Chicago, proved to be an astonishing film, a fantasy romance set amidst the endless complexities of contemporary life in India, particularly Mumbai (the site of a coordinated terrorist attack targeting two luxury hotels, a hospital, the train station and other sites throughout the city even as we watched the movie).

Director Danny Boyle hurtled us, his rapt audience, through an ever-changing kaleidoscope of images and set pieces, rummaging through slum and mansion, organized crime gang life, back office call centers, abandoned high rise construction sites, crowded train stations, alleyways, brothels, even airport runways!

One sequence stitched together a fascinating loop of scenes set on various trains racing through the countryside (clearly a reference to Boyle’s earlier hit film, TRAINSPOTTING). We’re even taken to the Taj Mahal but see it from a totally different perspective (a cautionary tale for us soon-to-be visitors, one involving shoe thefts and clueless “innocents abroad”).

The bits of humor sprinkled throughout often focused, in fact, on stereotypical tourists – Australian, German, American – as well as British call center supplicants angered by being shuttled off to Indian respondents. The cultural gap between East and West was thus yet another theme explored in passing; so, too, were Bollywood films, Hinduism, sanctioned police brutality, rapid economic change, family ties, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” and the persistence of True Love through all manner of time and circumstance.

The resulting stew proved riveting – and, truth be told, a bit daunting. On our way out of the theater, Heidi remarked “Maybe I’ve had enough of India,” even without setting foot in the country itself! Clearly, for her at least, it provided a wake-up call, throwing into sharp relief the distinction between a fifty-year-old idealistic set of images and dreamscapes and the hard realities of the early twenty-first century.

We found Thailand upon our return visit in 2003, nearly forty years after our Peace Corps years, to have been transformed beyond our wildest imaginings. Likely India will prove at least as revelatory an experience, one transforming our expectations into concrete experiences.

Our trepidation, as a consequence, has only increased, if only in light of the fact that this distance between image and reality, expectation and experience has grown exponentially, just in the past few days!