Kills Me Dead

I just might be the last person on earth to have seen Slumdog Millionaire. I’ve been avoiding it, it’s true, and the only reason I saw it was because it got nominated for Best Picture this year. I am nothing if not a thorough follower of the Oscars; how else can I express indignation about the winners if I haven’t seen everything nominated in a given category?

1. This movie is this year’s Atonement for me (only I don’t think this was nearly as bad as Atonement was). As a viewer I need to buy into the idea that Jamal and Latika are star-crossed soulmates in order to connect emotionally with the supposed trauma of their separation and the desperation to find a way back to each other. The problem is, I don’t. What I see is two kids who were friends briefly when they were young because they shared a mutual hustler guardian, followed by Jamal fixating on Latika for the rest of his life in a context that is completely different from the context we’ve seen him interacting with her in. Jamal isn’t shown mourning for the loss of the third musketeer in his circle of friends, he’s shown pining away for a girl he knew briefly and has apparently decided he’s in love with. As the years go on, he continues to be obsessed with her and while she’s happy to see him when their paths cross once more, you’re not given the impression that she too has spent years pining away for her childhood love. This is like Twilight, where Jamal isn’t actually the perfect guy, the sparkling marble paragon of male beauty, he’s actually a bit of a stalker.

   So I don’t believe in their love and thus the rest of the movie becomes rather moot. I don’t care about his reasons for appearing on the show and thus I don’t care about all the little vignettes of informational convenience Jamal finds himself in as he grows up.

2. Speaking of which, how nice for Jamal that the way he gained the knowledge he needed to successfully get through the game just happened to occur chronologically in his life in the same order that they appeared on the game show. Could the writers not have shaken things up a bit to make this somewhat less predictable? It’s not that interesting to have a question read and then know that the flashback scene you’ll see next will explain exactly why he ultimately knows the answer. Mix it up! Show me a flashback that will only have relevance later on! Or earlier! I’m not fussy.
3. That said, when Jamal was like “I don’t know what the name of the third Musketeer is” at the start of the movie, it was more than painfully obvious that this would be the winning question in his game.
4. The visuals were pretty stunning, but I can’t decide if that has anything to do with the film or everything to do with India. The Darjeeling Limited was equally beautiful, so I’m going to err on the side of India here. Remember, Danny Boyle also brought us The Beach, another quality film.
5. It’s unfortunate that Latika’s personality never really seemed to develop past the whole “chili balls” incident.
6. In a country of over a billion people, how do you consistently and rather efficiently find long lost friends so easily?
7. The littlest kids were pretty damn cute, though.
8. Loved the film star who showed up in his helicopter at the start. The clips of his films were absolutely hysterical.
9. I just don’t feel moved by this. Whatever happened to showing people in love? Stop telling me they’re in love; understanding it intellectually is not the same as being able to identify emotionally. Also, it’s just bad storytelling.
10. One of the reasons I usually like seeing a movie on opening night is so that I can avoid hype. If I see something first, then I don’t have to endure other people building up a film so much that I’m guaranteed to not like it as much as everyone else thinks I should have. I think my experience of this movie suffers somewhat from it being over-hyped, but I think even if I were to take hype out of the equation I’d still be left with an emotionally empty shell of a film.
11. ETA I forgot to mention my favourite part: the subtitles. I really appreciated the fact that they were given a semi-transparent background so that you could read the text regardless of what was on screen at the time. I also loved that the background colour changed depending on the colours in the scene or the person speaking the lines. Very awesome!