"Slumdog Millionaire" doesn't feel so good

‘Slumdog Millionaire’ doesn’t feel so good
By Pam Haynes

“Slumdog Millionaire,” directed by Danny Boyle, has been called a lot of things. It won Academies for Best Picture, Best Film Editing and Best Sound Mixing. The cast and creators of the movie deserve all of those awards and more.

However, it’s also been labeled the “Feel-good Film of the Decade.” That’s one award I’m not willing to give it so quickly.

Set in Mumbai, India, the story follows the lives of two brothers – Jamal (Dev Patel) and Salim (Madhur Mittal) Malik – who grow up in a slum, all the while losing their parents, being snatched by child traffickers and learning to steal from American tourists to survive.

The death of their mother, murdered by anti-Muslim terrorists, leaves the boys homeless and poorer than they’ve ever been. This is where they meet another orphan named Latika (Frieda Pinto). She joins Jamal and Salim on their quest for survival, but she holds Jamal’s heart for the rest of the movie and his adolescent life.

She also has something to do with the reason he applies to be a contestant on India’s version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” years later when he’s 18.

Most of the film consists of flashbacks to Jamal’s childhood which can be rather jolting. The scenes change quickly from him sitting in the hot seat on the famous television show to traumatic moments in his early years. And most of them were traumatic.

Even in the lightest of scenes, this movie leaves a depressed heaviness that weighs on the viewer‘s mind. It starts early on when the boys’ parents are still alive. A famous actor visit’s the slum in one of the highlights of Jamal’s childhood. Just when the actor arrives, Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar as the youngest Jamal) gets locked inside of an outhouse. While the rest of the village is screaming and crowding around the actor outside, he realizes there’s only one way out: down the toilet hole and into a giant pile of fecal matter. He takes the plunge and, though he manages to get the actor's autograph, he’s still covered in feces at the end of the scene from head to toe.

Infamously known as the “poop scene,” it reflects the way that viewers will feel about many other scenes. Despite the few good things that do happen to Jamal, he’s always in a pretty crappy situation.

His relationship with Latika plays out this way as well. The two are separated during their childhood, and though Jamal manages to find her several times in his teenage years, something always comes between them. The train station scene is one of the only scenes where Jamal smiles when he sees that Latika has come to meet him. It seems that the two will finally be reunited. But alas, the Indian mob who captured Latika long ago and forced her to live with mob’s boss as his wife, comes chasing after her. Needless to say, they manage to get to her before Jamal does.

I wish I could say that there were more feel good moments in the movie, but I fail to find any. That doesn’t mean that the movie isn’t worth watching. Just be prepared to deal with the tidal wave of issues in the film including government torture, religious battles, family betrayal and immense poverty.

It also presents a unique portrayal of Indian people by presenting Indian Muslims. It’s a rare depiction, and the film has been criticized for portraying non-Muslims as violent and for portraying the film’s characters as too evil or too money-obsessed. Regardless, it presents different Indian characters than most films before, using child-actors that were selected out of the real slums of India.

“Slumdog Millionaire,” based upon the book “Q & A: A Novel” by Vikas Swarup, is worth watching. It’s though-provoking and educational about events in the country of India, and it certainly makes you ponder the meaning of the word “millionaire” in the end.

It deserves all of the praise that it received except for that one, out-of-place title that the film makers slapped all over the theatrical posters. They may call it the “Feel-good Film of the Decade,” but I fail to find how this movie is “feel-good” in any way.