Movie Review: Slumdog Millionaire

Sometimes a director needs to shoot in a country he's never explored, among people in an alien culture he doesn't take for granted, to lift himself out of his comfort zone and drop us into a fresh experience. Danny Boyle has done all of that in “Slumdog Millionaire,” creating the sort of “Whale Rider” phenomenon that is both foreign to our daily lives yet universally appealing to anyone caught up in classic fairy tales.

The best of those tales have a dark side, of course: Sacrifices must be made for the kingdom to be won or the princess to be rescued, and circumstances in “Slumdog” impose more than one toll on the youthful hero. But however improbable those circumstances get, Boyle and writer Simon Beaufoy (who adapted a novel by Vikas Swarup) keep us rooting for Jamal Malik to slay his dragons.

Jamal is a chaiwallah – he delivers tea to employees at a call center – who gets on the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”

We meet him midway through his two-day quest for 20 million rupees (a little more than $400,000). But while he's being acclaimed a national hero by crowds in the street, a police inspector (Irfan Khan) is ordering a subordinate to dunk Jamal's head in cold water and shoot electricity through his feet. The show's oily host (Bollywood veteran Anil Kapoor) is convinced the contestant is a fraud and has thrown him to the cops. After all, how could an orphaned “slumdog” know such varied answers?

By pure chance, the kind attributed to destiny in fairy tales, Jamal's life has given him unique knowledge. It has usually come through suffering: Even the most innocent of the flashbacks has him dropped into a manure pit while trying to get the autograph of a Bollywood icon. We follow Jamal (played by multiple actors, including the adult Dev Patel) through a Dickensian series of mishaps: His mother is slain in a riot where Hindus attack Muslims, he falls into the clutches of a ruthless charmer who exploits child beggars, he almost dies more than once.

He has only two friends. Brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) grows up to be second-in-command for the neighborhood's most powerful gangster. Latika (Freida Pinto) ends up as the gangster's moll, though Jamal's boyhood love for her grows into adult passion. Chaste passion, of course, as it would be in an Indian film. The film feels like one sent from that land, with its score by Bollywood veteran A.R. Rahman and the intense colors of Anthony Dod Mantle's cinematography.

Beaufoy specializes in scripts about humble people elevated to importance (“The Full Monty,” “Mrs. Pettigrew Lives for a Day”), and “Slumdog” is firmly in that slightly melodramatic tradition. Boyle keeps it fresh by playing around with projection speeds over musical montages and letting the child actors speak Hindi, the language most natural to them. Loveleen Tandan gets credit as co-director for those sequences, though about 75 percent of the film is in English.

The filmmakers sometimes try too hard to wring emotions from us: There's no reason for the cops to torture this celebrity, especially as he cooperates as soon as they ask simple questions. Certain moments tax our credulity, but if you accept the film's ongoing message – “It is written,” with “it” being Jamal's destiny – you won't mind.

Boyle and Beaufoy showed courage by shooting a movie with a Muslim hero, especially when the target audience is mainly in the English-speaking world. They remind us the underclass of any nation might share our longing for respect and prosperity, and helping them fulfill those dreams can be a way to keep them from picking up guns.