Slumdog Millionaire offers no stars or glitz, just an inspiring, rags-to-riches story of an illiterate orphan teenager from the slums of Mumbai.
Danny Boyle’s movie is being touted as a dark-horse favourite for the best picture Oscar, alongside much higher-profile contenders such as The Dark Knight, the Brad Pitt/Cate Blanchett starrer The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the Meryl Streep drama Doubt and Kate Winslet/Leonardo DiCaprio’s Revolutionary Road.
Launched on November 12 on just 10 screens in the US, the film is drawing sizable audiences, an encouraging sign before it rolls out nationally; it opens here on Boxing Day.
The script by Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) follows 18-year-old Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) who dreams of escaping poverty when he competes in Who Wants to be a Millionaire?…until he’s arrested by the cops on suspicion of cheating.
“This is a breathless, exciting story, heartbreaking and exhilarating at the same time, about a Mumbai orphan who rises from rags to riches on the strength of his lively intelligence,” raved Roger Ebert.
“Slumdog Millionaire has the goods to bust out as a scrappy contender in the Oscar race,” says Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers. “It’s modern India standing in for a world in full economic spin. It’s an explosion of color and light with the darkness ever ready to invade. It’s a family film of shocking brutality, a romance haunted by sexual abuse, a fantasy of wealth fueled by crushing poverty.”
The subject may seem a left-field choice for director Boyle, who’s known for gritty, confronting films like Trainspotting, The Beach and Shallow Grave, and zombie pic 28 Days Later.
“I always try to make films intense — intensely pleasurable or intensely frightening or intensely joyful,” Boyle says. “Intensity is something I go for. That’s how I judge things.”
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Slumdog Millionaire: a nugget among life’s rubble
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