Phone a Friend: Slumdog Millionaire Reviewed

It's fitting that Slumdog Millionaire is the prohibitive favorite to win Best Picture honors at the Academy Awards on February 22nd. The movie is perfectly indicative of the kind of year 2008 was at cinemas: wildly mediocre, incredibly forgettable and wrought with issues.

I can't say I'm very surprised that the Academy, audiences and even most critics have embraced Slumdog Millionaire--it's clear from jump street that director Danny Boyle and writer Simon Beaufoy desperately want approval; they want this to be a mythic story for all-time. As the opening title card tells us, Jamal Malik is one question away from winning 20 million rupees on the Hindi version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. How'd he do it? Did he cheat? Is it blind luck? Is he a preternatural genius? Or, almost ominously, is it written? You don't need a lifeline to figure out this answer.

The conceit of Slumdog Millionaire is a clever one--like Magnolia, it's a coincidence movie. Jamal knows the answers to each question on the game show because each answer corresponds to something that happened earlier in his life. And most of the time, that "something" is incredibly tragic (the death of his mother; not a spoiler as it happens within the first 15 minutes), disgusting (he literally crawls through shit to see his favorite movie star) or violent (he witnesses a murder and gets a gun pulled on him). Of course because he just a lowly slumdog, no one believes that he could get to the final question without cheating and so Jamal is arrested, tortured (there is more torture in Slumdog Millionaire than in an episode of 24) and questioned by a doubting cop who slowly comes around. Along the way we find out about Jamal's ne'er-do-well brother, Salim, and, the long lost love of his life, Latika. Jamal likens them to The Three Musketeers, even though he can never remember the name of the third musketeer. If you don't think this will play into the finale, I've got a bridge to sell you.

With a hook like that, Slumdog Millionaire should be great. Why it fails to achieve anything other than middling success is something that falls at the feet of the filmmakers and actors. As Jamal, Dev Patel is an unnerving blank slate--whether he's talking about the atrocities he's lived through or winning millions of rupees, his expression doesn't change once. He's a passive observer and the performance doesn't fit the role. Because Mr. Patel doesn't seem to really care about his character's situation, in both good times and bad, I never cared about his situation. The same can be said of his love, Latika. Freida Pinto plays her as an adult and she is unquestionably gorgeous, but there is complete hollowness behind her eyes. She's like a pin-up girl staring out of a calendar, looking beautiful and yielding nothing. Latika has a rough go of it and yet from her expressions, you would never know any of it. There is no weight to either of the lead performances and that kills whatever Danny Boyle is striving for.

Of Danny Boyle: there seems to be this groundswell of love for him, stemming from the fact that he is "long-deserving". While I greatly admire Mr. Boyle's Trainspotting, almost everything else on his resume is fine and forgettable genre fare: The Beach, A Life Less Ordinary, Sunshine, Millions, 28 Days Later. This isn't Martin Scorsese we're talking about. His direction style here is manic and excited but it never made me feel excited. Mr. Boyle displays the visual panache of Tony Scott--but without any of Mr. Scott's fever dream madness (take that as the insult it's meant to be). Plus, he clearly has trouble getting anything from his actors. Even the young versions of Jamal, Salim and Latika all fail to feel like anything other than kids pretending.

In fact, there are only two praise worthy people in Slumdog Millionaire. Irrfan Kahn (The Namesake, The Darjeeling Limited) plays the cop with a level hand that reminded me of Gregory Peck; he's absolutely fantastic in limited time. But Anil Kapoor as the host of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire steals the movie. Decked out in a sharp suit, perfectly trimmed beard and slicked hair, Mr. Kapoor dives into his work and nearly explodes out of the frame. He's part Regis and part P.T. Barnum and he manages to be the only person in the entire film to show a lick of real emotion.

Slumdog Millionaire has been hailed as the first post-Obama film--it's gotten the requisite praise from Oprah (who, lest we forget, also loved Seven Pounds) and it just feels like the type of movie your friends will tell you was "wonderful!", "amazing!" and "hopeful!". That's fine; I'm not against hope. But I just want that hope to be earned--in Slumdog Millionaire, it's not. The whole thing feels like a rote exercise. It's a fairy tale without any magic. If it does eventually win the Oscar, it will rank with Crash as one of the weakest Best Picture selections in the history of the Academy Awards.

And yes, that's my final answer.