Dickens in Mumbai

The opening sequence of “Slumdog Millionaire,” the surprising new film from Scottish director Danny Boyle (“Trainspotting,” “28 Days Later...”), intercuts shots of a diffident young man named Jamal (Dev Patel) — about to face the big question on the popular Indian edition of the game show “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?” — with shots of the same young man getting the living crap beaten out of him by  a police inspector (Irrfan Khan)  and his minion.

The juxtaposition is an announcement — even fair warning, one might say — of the tone of the film to come: It’s an upbeat, purely Hollywood-style fairy tale marked by occasional, sudden bursts of really gruesome violence and downbeat social realism.

Jamal is a humble tea-runner at a Verizon call center in Mumbai; he is also uneducated, a Muslim, relatively dark-skinned and from a completely impoverished background — which is why he’s being beaten and even tortured with electricity. In the eyes of his captors (and of the TV show’s makers), he must be cheating. How could such a slumdog possibly know all these answers?

When he fails to confess — since, as the audience already assumes, he isn’t cheating — the cops force him to explain how he knows so much. They play back video of Jamal’s performance, pausing after each question for an explanation. Luckily for the film, the questions (with one or two exceptions) come in just the right order for Jamal’s answers to constitute the autobiographical flashback that makes up the bulk of the running time.

It’s a clever structure, variations of which have been used before. More than anything, it reminded me of that classic ’40s tearjerker “Penny Serenade,” in which Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, divvying up their old 78rpm records after the disintegration of their marriage, can’t help but play the songs that have meant the most to them, leading to a series of flashbacks. (I’m a sucker for “Penny Serenade,” and oh the mockery I have endured for admitting it.)

The difference is that, while “Penny Serenade” has an earthquake and a wrenching off-screen death, it doesn’t have, say, a little kid getting his eyes burnt out with kerosene by his Fagin-esque boss. (Having said that, let me nonetheless suggest that it’s another sign of the idiocy of the ratings system that “Slumdog Millionaire” gets an R while “Quantum of Solace” gets      a PG-13.)

My citation of Fagin is hardly a stray reference, as the story that unfolds in Jamal’s flashbacks is intended to be Dickensian, as the filmmakers readily admit. And it’s reasonable to imagine modern Mumbai as the contemporary equivalent of London, back when it was being convulsed into teeming disorder by the Industrial Revolution and consequent urbanization.

In brief, the story begins in the 80s, as the 6-year-old Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar, later to be played by Tanay Hemant Chheda, before morphing into Patel) and his older brother Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, then Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala, then Madhur Mittal) barely escape one of the horrifyingly frequent Hindu pogroms against Muslims that recur to this day. After teaming up with an adorable little girl named Latika (Rubina Ali, then Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar, then Freida Pinto), they are press-ganged into a team of child beggars, whose adult masters soon prove to be far less benevolent than they initially appear. 

The boys escape again, but Jamal keeps in his heart the goal of returning to free Latika. Eventually he finds her, but events take a negative turn and Jamal is  cast adrift.

Danny Boyle is far from the first person I would think of for a fairy tale project but, in fairness, the only two of his films I haven’t seen are exactly the two that (I am told) come closest — “A Life Less Ordinary” (1997) and “Millions” (2004). The rest of his theatrical oeuvre — from the brutal “Treasure of Sierra Madre” update “Shallow Grave” (1995) through the brilliantly ugly “Trainspotting” (1996) and “The Beach” (2000) to “28 Days Later...” (2002) and “Sunshine” (2007) — is aggressively hard-edged, even nasty.

Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy     is practically the anti-Boyle. He became famous for the irresistibly lovable “The Full Monty” (1997), and most of his later scripts, like “Blow Dry” (2001), are along the same vein. In fact, it is the tension between Beaufoy and Boyle’s divergent inclinations that gives “Slumdog Millionaire” most of its texture. To use a crude analogy, it’s a bit like Stanley Kubrick shooting an abandoned Frank Capra project.

As the need for a neat, happy ending approaches, Boyle necessarily drops his bleak outlook and does the full Beaufoy. The climactic lovers-racing-to-be-together-but-running-into-obstacles shtick feels more irritatingly artificial than the rest, though it’s otherwise no less effective.

The movie makes occasional references to Bollywood — most notably to megastar Amitabh Bachchan — and Beaufoy’s sunny work would fit in nicely with an industry where even the most serious and negative subject matter is turned into a vehicle for glossily produced song-and-dance numbers.

Even though A. R. Rahman (the most famous and lauded Bollywood composer) did the score for “Slumdog Millionaire,” Boyle resists the temptation to insert a fantasy musical number ... until the closing credit sequence, when the narrative itself is over. And, while it provides a bit of added energy, it’s far from the first rank of Bollywood production numbers. (Boyle seems to be cutting around Patel’s lack    of dancing chops.) Boyle still doesn’t seem like a musical comedy kind  of guy, but that’s exactly   what keeps “Slumdog Millionaire” so interesting.