Slumdog Millionaire

by Pam Grady

With Slumdog Millionaire, English director Danny Boyle travels far afield of his home patch, all the way to India. Applying the same intricate detail and heady atmosphere he once lavished on Edinburgh’s junkies in his breakthrough film Trainspotting, Boyle focuses on a teenager born in Mumbai’s wretched slums who becomes an instant celebrity when he appears on the Indian edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The kinetic, visually arresting drama, touching, sometimes funny and often horrifying, marks a new high in Boyle’s career as he explores India’s political, economic and social framework through the prism of a coming-of-age story. The buoyant Hindi-language saga looks like a sure bet for arthouse success and may well expand its reach beyond that modest range with good word of mouth and awards buzz.

When 18-year-old Jamal (Dev Patel) appears on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, everyone expects him lose during the show’s earliest rounds. A “slumdog” born in Mumbai when it was still Bombay, he has almost no education and a job as what game show host Prem (Anil Kapoor) contemptuously refers to as a “coffee wallah,” a boy who delivers beverages at a telemarketing firm. When the charming, soft-spoken young man begins a run up the board, it is the ultimate feel-good story, except to those who suspect him of cheating. A police inspector (Irrfan Khan) investigating Jamal’s case points out that no one, not even doctors or lawyers, ever gets very far on the show, yet this slumdog is well on his way to the ultimate prize of 20 million rupees.

Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy makes brilliant use of the game show format. The program figures into the drama in a number of ways, but nowhere more importantly than in the way it allows Jamal’s story to unfold. To avoid a fraud charge, he must explain to the police how he came to acquire knowledge that is generally unavailable to someone of his class and educational level. Each answer relates to some aspect of Jamal’s life and that of his older brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) and Latika (Freida Pinto), the girl he has loved since he was seven.

The tale that develops is worthy of at least Dickens, if not Dante, with these children born into a kind of hell from which their society offers no real hope for escape. Anti-Muslim rioters destroy their slum. An orphanage operator turns out to be less than benign. Both Salim, a born hustler, and Latika move into the orbit of a local mobster, and away from Jamal. On the surface, Mumbai is changing, brand-new high rises taking the place of slums, call centers offering new opportunities to an emerging middle class. But the underclass from which Jamal emerges remains much the same as it ever was.

Not that Slumdog Millionaire is as dire as all that. Boyle’s tale is shot through with moments of grace and unexpected levity. In one lively sequence, Jamal and Salim lam out of Mumbai, disembarking at the Taj Mahal, where they learn to hustle tourists in a scammers’ paradise. The movie is also ultimately a romance, as Jamal remains doggedly devoted to Latika even through long stretches where she is wholly absent from his life.

In another filmmaker’s hands, this could have been the stuff of turgid melodrama, the story’s contrivances laid bare. But Boyle directs with such exuberance that his energy lifts the movie. Slumdog Millionaire is a colorful, fast-paced affair as cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle captures India’s vibrancy with a camera that constantly roves Mumbai’s teeming streets or hovers overhead, capturing the country’s eye-popping colors. Boyle’s storytelling is economical; a tale with the sweep of an epic comes in at exactly two hours, set to the evocative rhythms of A.R. Rahman’s score and the propulsive beat of the hip-hop-infused soundtrack.

Three actors apiece play Jamal, Salim and Latika at various ages, and the Millions director proves once again just how adept he is in working with children. Particularly touching is Ayush Mahesh Kedekar, who plays Jamal at 7, a little boy who retains his sweetness and innocence amidst the squalor of his existence. On the other end of the spectrum, 18-year-old Harrow native Patel is spectacular as the vulnerable but determined nearly-adult Jamal who has seen and experienced way too much, yet remains a romantic at heart.

Boyle’s most ambitious film to date is also his greatest. Simply put, Slumdog Millionaire in one of the best—if not the best—films of 2008, as teeming with life as the slums it depicts.

Distributor: Fox Searchlight/Warner Bros.
Cast: Dev Patel, Irrfan Khan, Anil Kapoor, Freida Pinto and Madhur Mittal
Director: Danny Boyle
Screenwriter: Simon Beaufoy
Producer: Christian Colson
Genre: Drama
Rating: Not yet rated
Running time: 120 min.
Release date: November 28 ltd.

Doubt

by Ray Greene

Word-drunk and fueled equally by anger and compassion, writer-director John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt is a terrific and troubling drama of ideas bristling with nuance and grief. Instantly a leading contender for some of the year's biggest acting prizes, the film may have limited appeal for those who mistakenly think movies are exclusively about imagery and action, rather than intricate dialogue and complex characters. The arthouse audience could initially split over Doubt’s lyrical density and dramatic ambiguities, but the strong likelihood of multiple Oscar nominations should ensure a decent run and an overall solid commercial response.

Although it began life as a celebrated stageplay (Shanley’s primary and most prolific career is in the theatre), Doubt is actually closest in spirit to 5 Corners, Shanley's first movie script from 1987. In that startling but forgotten magic-realist rumination on anarchy and youth, a loosely-connected group of Bronx teenagers spend a long autumn night in 1964 enacting an ensemble bildungsroman, while the mad and remorseless maelstrom of “The Sixties” gathers force just outside the frame like something hungry and alive. Doubt is set in 1964 too, also in the Bronx, also in autumn, and it similarly concerns a milieu that gains in poignancy from our awareness of something the characters don’t know, which is that everything they hold close is about to be torn away from them by an accelerating world. The ensemble here is one of priests and nuns—characters who could have stared across altars and desks at the children in Shanley’s earlier screenplay—and their ecclesiastical certitudes are made simultaneously more rigid and more frail by the rulebound and dogmatic nature of their religious service.

The radical changes of the Sixties came early to Catholicism. The Second Vatican Council, which convened in 1962 and closed in 1965, brought an unprecedented liberalizing spirit into the Church, an Indian summer long since rescinded by the combined conservative papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. In Doubt, Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) incarnates the Church’s momentary shift toward tolerance and modernity. He smokes and drinks and tells questionable jokes, and seems alive to whole realms of carnal, sensual and political experience earlier adherents to his calling might have rejected outright. Father Flynn is a fresh wind in an airless room, and many of his parishioners, especially the youngest among them, respond to him with bemusement and even love.

This puts Flynn into diametric opposition with Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), an unrepentant disciplinarian and the principal of the parish grade school, who convinces herself there may be something not quite right in Flynn’s affection for the boys in her charge. The sister’s suspicions are communicated to novice teacher Sister James (a suitably wan and milky Amy Adams). When an incident involving Father Flynn and a lone and vulnerable eighth grader (Joseph Foster) seems to confirm Sister Aloysius’ deepest fears, all four characters are hurled into a new context of half-certainties and irresolution—a gray and smudged charcoal sketch suddenly imposed over a world they took for black and white.

There will be no better performances given in an American film this year than Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius or Viola Davis as Mrs. Muller, mother to the boy who may have had inappropriate contact with Father Flynn. The single scene between these two actors encapsulates everything that’s great about this movie, with Sister Aloysius’ intractable rectitude suddenly confronted by the despair, compromises and mixed motives of a true flesh and blood human being. Streep, who built her career on mannerist character turns, seems to grow more supple and believable with each passing year. Her aging nun is a kind of sympathetic aria to a vanished era of certainty, embodied in a woman whose kindness is as undeniable and reflexive as her disapproval for all the meaningless conveniences of contemporary life. Watching her certitude erode is in some ways watching a piece of machinery come to life.

Davis, a great stage actress and a virtual unknown to filmgoers, can break the viewer’s heart with the simple dignity of the way she wears her dented Jackie O pillbox hat. Her battered and desperate Mrs. Muller is such a quicksilver blending of fatalism and denial, aspiration and suppressed rage that she splutters in the mind like a fuse sliding toward detonation long after the actress herself has vanished from the screen. As Pastor Flynn, the very fine Hoffman is perhaps a less felicitous choice, for it upsets Shanley's careful textual equivalencies to have such a humid and fulsome actor—a stereotypical heavy, despite his capacity—playing a priest who ought to seem on the surface nearly as innocuous as the Bing Crosby of Going My Way.

In its previous incarnation as a Pultizer-winning play, Doubt was frequently seen as a reaction to the vast molestation scandal engulfing the Catholic Church in the first years of the 21st century. The unvarnished evil of child abuse is certainly a central subtext in this picture—a spreading stain from an unseen source, undermining the characters’ trust in institutionalized sanctimony, perhaps even in the idea of God itself. It’s a measure of Shanley’s precision though that he can address this critical and explosive issue as a sidebar while leaving his central conflict disturbingly unresolved and subtly expressed.

For ultimately, Doubt is not primarily a movie about a hot button topic but rather an existential morality play, an unblinking vision of the remorseless formlessness of life as it’s actually lived, and a comment on the potential futility in trying to impose moral clarity and unambiguous order on the murk of human motives and behavior. Within the popcorn sanctimony of the American screen, it’s a rare movie that’s willing to ask such fundamental questions about what exactly goodness is, and a rarer film still that's willing to compliment it’s audience by leaving so much for the viewer to decide.

Distributor: Miramax
Cast: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Viola Davis
Screenwriter/Director: John Patrick Shanley
Producer: Scott Rudin and Mark Roybal
Genre: Drama
Rating: PG-13 for thematic material
Running time: 104 mins.
Release date: Dec. 12 ltd.; expands Dec. 19; expands Dec. 25

Quantum of Solace

by Richard Mowe

With Daniel Craig now firmly establishing ownership of 007 on his second outing, the franchise looks safe in his hands for further global domination at the box office. Tightly scripted, it delivers handsomely on spectacular set pieces in exotic locales from the Italian Alps to arid planes of Chile.

The breathless antics may be more Jason Bourne than James Bond but that doesn’t prevent 007’s latest excursion from exerting a fierce grip that never really lets go of your senses from the traditional opening car chase—this time in the Italian Alps—to the closing scenes across the arid plains of Bolivia.

There is no time to reflect on the implausible aspects of the plot or to lament the lack of time for proper romancing or relationships between Bond and his female cohorts; apart, that is, from Judi Dench’s steely matriarchal M who worries her normally trustworthy protégé may have gone “wild.” Once one challenging burst of physicality is over then it is on to the next one at breakneck speed for Craig, whose muscular physique is only on show romantically in one discreet scene of dalliance.

Although this may be Bond as action hero, Craig has enough presence with his firm jaw and blue eyes to infer a brain at work, as well as brawn, as he countermands orders from MI5 for the global good.

It is worth recalling that this is Bond number 22, making it the longest running film franchise in movie history. Director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball) does a decent job of continuing to give Ian Fleming’s creation a breath of new life—and its streamlined running time of a crisp 106 minutes (much shorter than Casino Royale's 147 minutes) should please theatres trying to cram in as many shows as feasible.

Forster is strong on the set pieces: memorably, one takes place during a performance of the opera Tosca in the Bregenz Opera House while another has Bond bailing out of crashing plane without a parachute. Even before the roller coaster is properly under way there’s a fantastically energetic sequence against the backdrop of the famous horse race in Siena.

Writers Haggis, Purvis and Wade have no compunction about displaying their hero’s sheer callousness of intent as he dispatches agents both friendly and evil, although for some tastes the narrative line may be lacking in substance.

Against Bond’s all-pervading dominance it is difficult for the rest of the cast to make their marks yet. French actor Mathieu Amalric emerges strongly as a corrupt tycoon trying to overthrow the Bolivian government behind a smokescreen of green credentials. Olga Kurylenko, too, is in there with more than a shout as the feisty local trying to avenge the deaths of her family, while the excellent Italian veteran Giancarlo Giannini returns briefly as Mathis, a close confidant of Bond. As a more typical Bond girl, Gemma Arterton dispenses a disarming brand of cool chic.

Craig doesn’t have all that many opportunities to turn on the fatal charm but when he does there are willingly compliant victims, such as the airline check-in girl who does just as she is told. With Daniel Craig making the running, who wouldn’t?

Distributor: Columbia Pictures / Sony
Cast: Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Almaric, Judi Dench, Giancarlo Giannini, Gemma Arterton and Jeffrey Wright
Director: Marc Forster
Screenwriters: Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade
Producers: Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson
Genre: Action/Adventure
Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, and some sexual content
Running time: 106 min.
Release date: November 14, 2008