What if the only way you could find your lost true love was to go on a wildly popular game show and hope that she was watching at the same time? As preposterous as it sounds, this was the premise of a film that was supposed to go straight to video, but Fox Searchlight saved it from obscurity and it went on to win several Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The film, if you haven’t seen it, is called Slumdog Millionaire.
Director Danny Boyle’s unflinching yet uplifting tale based on the book Q & A by Vikas Swarup centers around a penniless 18 year old boy (played by Dev Patel in his breakout role), who becomes a contestant on the wildly popular Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire and his uncanny ability to answer questions night after night, despite the fact that he never received a formal education.
As the film opens, the show’s producers, suspecting that Jamal Malik is cheating, has him hauled down to the police station where the jailer forcibly tries to extract the truth out of him. There’s only one problem: the correct answers are coming from moments coinciding with his life, starting from his life as an orphan and moving forward in time to present day.
His life begins with he and his brother Salim losing his mother in a riot and having to fend for themselves. While Jamal uses his brains to survive, Salim chooses a darker, more violent path. They also find themselves torn as brothers in their love for a beautiful young girl by the name of Latika, who comes and goes out of their lives, in and out of puberty and into young adulthood. At some point, they decide that it’s time to part company and find their own way.
Ultimately, realizing that he can’t live without Latika, he reunites with her, but his reunion is fraught with peril, because she’s now living with a crime boss, which just so happens to employ teenage Salim. Ultimately, Salim, realizing that he’s not meant to be with Latika, makes the ultimate sacrifice, providing the diversion that Latika needs to escape and to be with Jamal now and forever.
Director Danny Boyle provides us with an epic story set in gritty as well as beautiful locations. He doesn’t shy away from the violence as well as one particularly gross scene where young Malik has to take a dive in a latreen to escape being caught. The ending took this reviewer by surprise as Danny provides an ending credits sequence that is right out of Bollywood movies, which means there’s a lot of music and a lot of dancing.