Is Slumdog Millionaire worth the praise?

Is Slumdog Millionaire worth the praise it is getting? It is a well made no doubt. But the more you think about it, the more you realise that the movie doesn’t live up to the hype. In the so called review, I said “from a cinematic point of view, this is a very well made and  directed movie and definitely worth a watch.”

What I had failed to mention, and what is pretty obvious to me, was written in a piece by Matthew Schneeberger (not me obviously) on rediff.com titled, you guessed it, “Is Slumdog Millionaire worth the praise?” (http://www.rediff.com/movies/2009/jan/29is-slumdog-worth-it.htm)

Some of the issues raised against the movie, which i tried debating against Anorak (Who had written a review of the movie), have been put forth in a clear and precise manner. I shall reproduce the same verbatim taking nothing away from the author.  Read on…

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“Is Slumdog Millionaire worth the praise?

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Yes, despite what the most zealous of naysayers claim, India’s problems are real and manifold: extreme poverty, communal violence, child beggary, painful vestiges of the caste system, to name a few. And all of these exist even in modern, urban India, the India of all those Western magazines profiles, the India of business process outsourcing and information technology.

So it’s good that someone has held up a mirror to remind India that, yes, you’ve come far, but that you have a long way to go, too.

Before seeing the movie, I thought those who claimed that it portrayed India in a negative light were being ridiculously defensive. Having seen it, I understand where they are coming from. Yes, Mumbai has squalor and violence and cruelty. But it has great humanity and brotherhood and character, none of which were adequately represented in the film.

One of the first negative reviews of Slumdog I read was from the blog The Great Bong, who absolutely lacerated it. In it, the blogger wrote, “Well yes these things do happen in India. However the problem is when you show every hellish thing possible all happening to the same person. Then it stretches reason and believability and just looks like you are packing in every negative thing that Westerners perceive about India for the sake of crowd pleasing.”

He goes on to propose a film about an outlandish string of events happening to an African-American boy in the US, and says, “Even though each of these incidents have actually happened in the United States of America, I would be accused of spinning a fantastic yarn that has no grounding in reality, that has no connection to the ‘American experience’ and my motivations would be questioned, no matter how cinematically spectacular I made my movie. At the very least, I wouldn’t be on 94 percent on Tomatometer and a strong Oscar favourite.”

He’s right. Say an Indian director travelled to New Orleans for a few months to film a movie about Jamal Martin, an impoverished African American who lost his home in Hurricane Katrina, who once had a promising basketball career, but who — following a drive-by shooting — now walks with a permanent limp, whose father is in jail for selling drugs, whose mother is addicted to crack cocaine, whose younger sister was killed by gang-violence, whose brother was arrested by corrupt cops, whose first born child has sickle cell anaemia, and so on. The movie would be widely panned and laughed out of theatres.

That, to me, is Slumdog Millionaire: contrived, pretentious, absurd, hollow, inauthentic, a pseudo-statement about social justice. And yet today the film stands on the precipice of Hollywood’s highest honour, the Academy Award for Best Picture.

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That kinda sums up what i wanted to write about Slumdog, albeit more creatively. Somewhat an extension of the “Real India” stuff i had written.

Cheers

Jais