Slumdog Millionaire

Some months back during one of the free preview weekends, I recorded Slumdog Millionaire. I noticed that it's going to be on HBO Zone tomorrow at 12:35 PM for those of you with the HBO package, so I finally sat down to watch it and do a review on it here.

The movie opens with Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) being interrogated by the police. Apparently, he was a contestant on India's version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and reached the final question. The producers and police thought he must have been cheating because Jamal is just a lowly call-center employee so there's no way he could possibly know the answers to these difficult questions that have stumped bright professionals with good educations.

Flash back to the story of Jamal's life, interspersed with his sitting in the Millionaire "Hot Seat" opposite host Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor). Jamal grew up in the slums of Mumbai together with his older brother Salim (Madhur Mittal as adult Salim; two other pairs of actors play Jamal and Salim at earlier points in their lives) and their mother, at least until there are anti-Muslim riots that result in Mom being killed and life going from bad to worse for Jamal and Salim.

They get "rescued" by Maman, who isn't actually much of a rescuer at all, but a nasty guy who takes street children and turns them into beggars, even blinding some of the children because blind beggars make more money. Before running away they meet Latika (Freida Pinto as an adult), who isn't able to escape with them and is eventually forced into prostitution as a result.

Salim and Jamal make their way selling things and pickpocketing on trains until getting booted off in Agra and becoming phony guides at the Taj Mahal, making hard currency from western tourists who obviously feel sorry for these kids. All along the way, Jamal is picking up bits of information that just happen to be things he gets asked about in his Millionaire questions.

Salim and Jamal make it back to Mumbai and even find Latika, but their lives go separate ways when Salim goes to work for a crime lord and Jamal has to try to make a more honest living, eventually becoming the call-center worker we all know and hate because doesn't everybody hate the Indian call centers.

Slumdog Millionaire is a well-made movie, but I did have some problems with it. It's supposed to be showing a harrowing journey through abject poverty, but everything is movie-sanitized. While it's certainly possible for people to pick up bits of information in one area of life that they remember when such questions show up on a quiz show -- I remember Jeopardy asking about Charles Parnell once and I sitting at home knew it from the Clark Gable movie, for example -- the idea that it would happen on all 15 questions in that coincidental a way defies plausibility, I think.

There was also a critical plot point of Prem and Jamal meeting in a bathroom during a commercial break, something that I absolutely cannot imagine happening on the American version of any game show, where contestants are kept very strictly isolated until their taping sessions are over. Maybe foreign game shows don't adhere to such strict standards, but not this lax.

Still, if you haven't seen Slumdog Millionaire before, it's definitely worth watching. It did get a DVD and Blu-ray release, but seems to be out-of print. It is available on Amazon's streaming if you can do that.