'Slumdog Millionaire': A complete cinematic package

Every so often a film seems to come out of nowhere, knocks the socks off of audiences and reviewers and ends up harvesting a bunch of awards for that year.

"Slumdog Millionaire” is one of those. This British film had only a limited release near the end of 2008 because it was perceived to have no great prospects in this country, however, it did qualify for award recognition. But it met with such film festival acclaim that it went into general release last month and richly deserves it.

I have reviewed all of the five films nominated for an "Oscar” by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and this one, as a total production, eclipses all of the others. With great pacing and direction by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandam, multiple rich sepia tones in the filming, the variety of scene framings and panoramic cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle and the best film-editing job in recent memory by Chris Dickens, this is the most complete cinematic package I remember since "Lawrence of Arabia.”

It has an all-India cast in which one of the most interesting details is, because most male film leads in India are so strikingly dark and handsome, Dev Patel was deliberately selected for the lead role of Jamal Malik because of his very ordinary looks. So he ended up stealing the acting in the film and is, now, in this country building star power for the future.

Much of the story is told in retrospect, as Jamal is being tortured by a police inspector (Irrfan Khan), trying to find out how this uneducated young man had already been able to run up 10 million Rupees on a famous "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” TV show hosted by Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor) and going for the finale of 20 million Rupees.

During the interrogation, in a series of flashbacks from Jamal’s life, it develops that most of his answers were drawn from his own tortured life, beginning when he and his older brother Salim (Madhur Mittal), were orphaned as very small children in a Hindu attack upon Muslims in the slums of Calcutta (now Mumbai), reputed to be worst urban slums on the globe.

The two little boys were thrown upon their own resources and cleverness as they wandered through much of India. On the way, they befriended Latika (Freida Pinto), a little orphaned girl who becomes the love of Jamal’s life. They are swept up by Maman (Ankur Vikal), a ruthless gangster who teaches children to sing to have them more effectively beg for charity.

The three escape but get separated from Latika and it is Jamil’s search for her that consumes the rest of the movie. As a late teenager, he manages to appear on the television show in the hope she will see him there. His brother Salim has taken a different course and became the right hand man of a gangster chief Javed (Mahesh Manjrekar).

The actors who play the three at very young stages in their lives had been recruited from those slums. They are uniformly adorable, if that is a suitable term to apply for those surviving under such conditions. But there is something very inspiring about their resilience in the face of all sorts of trials.

That plot is only the spine of the film; upon which is built a riveting scanning of life in the lower reaches of that teeming population that is India.

There is really nothing more to say other than if I had a voice in the Oscar derby, this is the one that would get my vote.

Just a passing note: Uniquely for such a dramatic story, just before the closing credits comes a raucous scene of over 100 dancers on a train platform. Never saw that before.

But it does add room for one more plaudit for Dev Patel. Among other things, he is a very talented western-style dancer.