From Slumdog to Top Dog

ENLARGE PHOTO+

Jamal (Patel) is as stunned by success as Slumdog's markers are

Everett

• Share

It defies the laws of sociopolitical physics: a young man of low birth and no formal education amassing a fortune by answering obscure questions on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Yet Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), a sweet-souled 18-year-old, aces questions about Indian history because he's lived through it--just barely. He's grown up in obscene and criminal poverty with his tougher brother Salim (Madhur Mittal). Jamal wants to stay on the show long enough to attract the notice of his lifelong love, Latika (Freida Pinto), whom he's lost in the billion-strong crowd but who must be out there somewhere. Can't a slum boy hope for a miracle?

The same long odds applied to Slumdog Millionaire, the Anglo-Indian movie about these outsiders. It was in danger of losing a U.S. theatrical release and going direct to DVD when the company that owned it was shuttered. Yet the film, made for $13 million, has earned nearly $60 million in North America. And after top wins at the Golden Globes and from the Producers and Screen Actors guilds, it's the front runner to take the Academy Award for Best Picture on Oscar night, Feb. 22. Miracle, anyone? (See the top 10 movie performances of 2008.)

That Slumdog should get anywhere near an Oscar is--like the crazy-wonderful plot twists in a Bollywood musical--both improbable and inevitable. India provided the backdrop for two Oscar-favored dramas of the '80s: Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (11 nominations and eight wins, including Best Picture, beating E.T.) and David Lean's A Passage to India (11 nominations, two wins).

But those films offered a British view of the subcontinent and its people. Slumdog has no Western intermediary onscreen to explain the native folkways to the international audience. Slumdog's major players--three sets of three kids, playing Jamal, Salim and Latika at different ages--are all Indian (though Patel was born and raised in Britain). Even if redemption awaits Jamal, the violence he and Salim witness, or perpetrate, is as gritty as that in the Brazilian urban classic City of God (2002). And with a third of its dialogue in Hindi, Slumdog would come closer than any top Oscar winner has to being a foreign-language film.

Exotic helps, but the movie is connecting with audiences not because it's foreign but because it strikes universal chords about personal fulfillment, romantic obsession and the chance to rise from the bottom of the slag heap to the top of the Taj Mahal--and because it whirls through its rags-to-riches tale with a speed and energy that would put a Hollywood action film to shame. For these qualities, you can thank Simon Beaufoy, who wrote the script from Vikas Swarup's novel Q&A, and director Danny Boyle. Eleven years ago, Beaufoy was Oscar-nominated for another screenplay about underdogs going public, The Full Monty. Boyle has often dealt with the plight of the working-class young, notably in Trainspotting and Millions. Both men know how to mine poor folks in parlous straits for humor and heartbreak.

Reading the Swarup novel, Beaufoy wanted to tweak the story from poor boy wins big to Everyman needs a girl. "And once I'd decided on this search for a lost love," he says, "I had to rework all the other stories. The structure is the same, but the questions [asked by the game-show host] are different." Beaufoy made four trips to India over 18 months "to get a completely fresh look at India. I spent a long time in the Juhu slum in Mumbai. I was trained as a documentary director, and I just went back to doing that. I listened to people, talked to people." From these wanderings came moments that give the film its pungent life, like the scene in which Jamal jumps into a mound of human waste to get the autograph of Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan.

Boyle could have cast the slum kids with English speakers, but he realized he'd get more natural performances from the real thing. "They don't have any inhibitions about acting," he says. "We'd been working in the slums, and we'd ask local people, 'Would you play this part?' 'No problem,' they'd say. 'Do you want me to do my Amitabh look or my Shah Rukh Khan look?' I'd say, 'No, do your own look.'" Having slum children play two of the three 6-year-olds meant shooting their scenes in Hindi. But as Boyle says, "Nobody comes out of the film saying, 'I just watched a subtitled film.' They just say, 'Weren't those kids great?'"

See pictures of Mumbai sifting through the rubble after the terrorist attacks.

See pictures of movie costumes.