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SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. Dir Danny Boyle. 2008

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Stunning cinematography of slum life in India, oblique camera angles, great colour and lively footage of laughing, running children. The boy Jamal and his brother live in flimsy shacks, making small amounts of money any way they can. Orphaned when a gang kill their mother, the boys take off and live amongst the mountains of rubbish, grubbing around for survival. It is unclear why Jamal’s brother is unkind to the little girl who attaches herself to them but Jamal is sympathetic towards her and, for a time, they travel together.

After a short, calamitous and fascinating life, the teenager Jamal is a contestant on ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ watched by most of the country. He answers each question correctly, as each one is relevant to an episode of his extraordinary life. This gets him arrested for cheating because the quiz show doesn’t have the funds to pay his prize (although the reason for his arrest is not made clear in the film, and the clever reason for Jamal needing to confront the quiz show host is avoided altogether).

This adaptation is fairly closely based on Vikas Swarup’s examination of Indian poverty but Beaufoy’s screenplay omits the incest, rape and violence of the original, and the rescuing ‘angel’ of a young woman solicitor, replacing her with a policeman. Beaufoy has dropped the novel's casual, domestic cruelty and inserted mafia style gangsters for tension in its place. In doing this the story has suffered somewhat.

It’s true that the original Q and A (now changed to Slumdog Millionaire like the film) has an implausible plot and is so full of extraordinary coincidences that it has a magical feel at times. However, in tinkering with the story, merging two female characters into one love interest, making the two friends into brothers and mixing up the bad guys, the neatness of the novel’s tie up is lost.

One section of Swarup’s novel is the realistic, painful portrait of a young girl put into prostitution by her own family, a traditional form of wage earning for her tribe, and who is managed by her pimp brother. The boy, Jamal, meets and comes to love her, and eventually marries her. Boyle chooses to avoid offending Indian sensibilities and has criminals make a whore of her when the truth of this cultural abuse is bad enough. The cruelty she suffers from Jamal’s brother makes no sense, as Salim rejects her, then rapes her, then captures her and slashes her face, then frees her. Salim is equally contrary towards Jamal, but why? There is none of this schizoid behaviour in the novel, and no suicide either and the two lovers go free as though gangsters would ever allow them to get away. Preferable was the clever tie up by Swarup in which one of Jamal’s employers (who turns out to be a hit man) is tricked into killing the creepy Fagin character who has been maiming street children so they could beg for him, and eliminating any threat.

Boyle captures great vitality in the footage of the children in the early part of the film and filming is outstanding, but working gangsters into the plot makes a muddle of the story.
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