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.
