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Slumdog Millionaire

How we answer life’s questions

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
Directors Danny Boyle & Loveleen Tandan
Cert. 15
Running time: 2 hours

It is a quiz clichˇ that the definition of an easy question is one to which you know the answer. When a young man from the very poorest of poor backgrounds, born in the slums of Mumbai, without home or education, reaches the big money end of the TV quiz show ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ nobody can understand how he could do it.

Some are convinced he must have been cheating. How could he have known those answers?

The film uses this ingenious device to take the audience question by question through the sometimes gruelling story of the young man’s feral childhood. It is a searing expose of poverty and child exploitation, as enlightening for our time as Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist was for his (but without that nice Mr. Brownlow). And there is no hint of sermonising about Slumdog Millionaire. The tale is told without bitterness or self-pity and the children who are victims of such cruelty are also portrayed as free agents who make choices of their own.

It is very cleverly filmed with some memorable camera work and the acting, especially by the three actors who play the main protagonist Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar, Tanay Chheda and Dev Patel), is superb. But it is not an easy watch at times. It does not spare the viewer the depths of human barbarity. Having said that, it is a worthwhile film and a film with some hope based on the strength of the human spirit and the power of love.

What is its message? Perhaps that each of us answers life’s questions according to our experience. (But this reminds us that the life of faith answers life’s questions not according to our experiences but according to God’s promises.) Perhaps that the big prizes are granted according to some kind of preordained decision that is out of our hands. Perhaps most of all that the big prize is in the end not pounds or dollars or rupees but unstoppable, enduring love.

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