Not for the first time, the Minister finds himself cast adrift.
A solitary man.
I am a rock.
I am, indeed, an island.
For while critics, audiences and judging panels the length and breadth of the (western) world can’t get enough of Slumdog Millionaire, I sat through it on Saturday afternoon wondering when the Oscar-worthy film would begin.
The Minister’s Wife thought it was wonderful.
Everyone seems to think it’s wonderful.
The Minister, though, thinks it’s a poorly-plotted, badly-scripted, erratically-acted drone through an over-familiar story that has been photographed by someone with a pronounced tremor, lit by someone with cataracts and edited by someone with ADD.
The Minister contends that had this movie been set anywhere “conventional” it would have been met with the same criticism that was thrown at Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet – ie that Danny Boyle has taken a hackneyed and melodramatic story and added layer upon layer of loud music, bright lights and overenthusiastic editing to create something less than the sum of its parts in a desperate attempt to appeal to the groovy hipster cats.
It didn’t help that I saw it while under the weather and it didn’t help that I saw it in a multiplex screen whose front tweeter speaker wasn’t working, so some parts of the dialogue were muddied and flat. But even putting that to one side, I just didn’t like the movie, didn’t connect with any of the characters, felt the child actors were – how shall I put this kindly? – not very good and sat there for two hours thinking that I could be doing something far more constructive like taking painkillers and sleeping.
(At this stage I should add that we saw Frost/Nixon before Slumdog Millionaire and, while it was a little stagey – inevitably – and made one wonder when Michael Sheen is going to play roles that don’t involve watching old videos, I thought it a fine all-round piece of film-making.)
On the whole, I like Danny Boyle. I really like 28 Days Later. Shallow Grave and Trainspotting are good movies. Millions is solid enough, though a little preachy. I even quite like (small) parts of A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach. (I haven’t seen Sunshine.)
Part of Boyle’s appeal to me is that the plots of most of those movies have some quirk or hook that make them at least a little bit different from so much of the dross piped by Hollywood into our eyeballs. For me, Slumdog Millionaire falls flat because there is no such quirk or hook other than the location of the story.
If an Indian movie depicted poverty and the underclass in Britain in the same way that Boyle depicts Mumbai, the Daily Mail would be demanding the director’s extradition and questions in the House.
(And, while I don’t wish to suggest that parts of our towns and cities have anything like the grinding poverty of the developing world, let’s not forget that hundreds of thousands of children in the world’s fifth richest Clusterfuck To The Poor House nevertheless still grow up in what equates with the United Nations’ definition of “poverty”.)
The Daily Express would accuse the film of glamourising a culture of violence and gang warfare.
The Sun might notice that the poor aspire to subsistence and that wealth is a dream for other, more affluent people. (It would, however, illustrate the point with a photograph of a young woman’s breasts.)
The Daily Telegraph would take glee in pointing out that gambling is a vice, not an aspiration, and that intellect, education, application and creativity are more reliable ways of earning a living than taking part in game shows. It would accuse the film-makers of displaying shocking naivety in the face of a massively complicated problem.
Boyle’s heart is undoubtedly in the right place – the Minister’s Wife, usually a fairly reliable source, assures me that the child actors will receive an education and the benefit of a trust fund as a result of their participation in the movie – but the Slumdog Millionaire, I contend, wears the Emperor’s new clothes.
Not for the first time, style has prevailed over substance and the Minister is nonplussed.
This is, I feel an interesting and wholly legitimate point of view. I must start by saying that I liked the film. That having been said, two of the central points that you make (firstly that the film is strangely unoriginal and secondly that it glamourises poverty by making you gasp at the beautiful colours) are fundamentally right.
Personally speaking, I also feel it falls squarely into a category of movies which tends to yield a lot of Oscars but which I rarely ever connect with – the category of the aggressively middlebrow (Frost/Nixon appears to be another example of this, but one which I have not yet seen, though I did watch it on stage).
There are two other – not inisgnificant – criticisms, which are that of plausibility (we are supposed to swallow the fact that the makers of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, no matter which country of broadcast, would deliver a teenager to be tortured in between takes) and that of central inaccuracy (the plot fundamentally relies on a contestant being obliged to answer the final question of the competition, when 90% of viewers know that no-one is obliged to answer any question in Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, but can opt to take the money they have won up to that point).
So why did I like the film? I suppose ultimately I liked it because while I was watching it, I slowly recognised what Boyle was trying to do, which was to make a Friday night popcorn film which could appeal, at least to some extent, to literally everyone, regardless of taste, gender or intelligence. I felt that this was a relatively noble undertaking and that by doing so, he heavily risked the film appealing to no-one. He wanted it to be a film wives could persuade their husbands to see, husbands could persuade their wives to see, daughters could persuade their mothers to see and no-one would come out disappointed. I think on the whole he has succeeded (with obviously the Ministerial family being an exception) and I don’t begrudge him. The film isn’t offensive or trite enough to be harmful – it has moments of originality and beauty and in its depiction of call centres and skyscrapers in Mumbai gently hints at how India is changing, but most of all it simply delivers on its own terms.
So despite the lack of real risk-taking in the story-telling (lets hear it for gorgeous child actors, a recognisable brand (WWTBAM), the lead female character played by a model, squalor that’s either beautiful or never too squalid, redemption by the ladleful, just desserts for all and a defiantly mawkish happy ending (not to mention a Bollywood routine in the credits)) I still felt it was a risky project. I really felt (call me naive) that it was a film designed to make people happy and awaken just the slightest bit of understanding of India, rather than just make oodles of cash. Because you see Danny Boyle, unlike Ron Howard for example, has never been a hired gun for the studios. He does the films he wants to watch and he wants his audience to watch in his own way – he is true to himself, even as a commercial film maker.
I sat with my wife and the temptation to criticise what I could see to be flaws and/or cliche washed over me.
Ultimately Slumdog Millionaire is the perfect Oscar movie. Truly great films rarely or never win large numbers of Oscars. Those that do are either ghastly (Braveheart, Titanic) transitory (Shakespeare in Love, Ordinary People) or are examples of great filmmakers going mainstream (One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, The Departed). Slumdog, closer to Lord of the Rings in this sense (although not putting the audience through 6 hours of it) or Dances with Wolves, is almost more deserving as it just reaches out to all audiences and delivers an uncynical entertainment aesthetic I can respect.
I agree that Boyle’s heart is in the right place, cinematically as well. And whilst it’s not on my top Ten list for 2008 (I saw it a couple of months ago on Bafta preview DVD) that’s good enough for me.