Slumming in the Slums of Mumbai

Contrary to most people and critics, I am going to dissent on “Slumdog Millionaire,” which was selected as Best Picture last Sunday night, completing a remarkable sweep of the major movie awards for 2009. Originally, it was a film that was going straight to DVD, as it was first seen as an Indie that would have a small or limited audience. But it picked up a distributor and soon took off like a rocket. It cost $14 million to make and to date it has returned $150 million; and now that it won the Academy Award for Best Picture it could approach $200 million before it cools off. Not bad for a combination British/Indian film of modest ambition and an unknown cast of actors. So what’s my complaint about this phenomenally popular movie? Strangely, I resisted going to see it in the first place. Why, I don’t really know. I was suspicious of its sudden success and popularity, like it was too good to be true. But I made a special effort to see it before the Awards ceremony on February 22.
Shortly after the story began to unfold, I was put off by its premise. Slumdog was not a term current within the confines of the slums of Mumbai; it was invented by the screenwriter who thought it was clever. He apparently didn’t realize what an insult it is in India where dogs are the untouchables of the animal world. But it is already an expression that has taken root in the West, an image equivalent to ‘dirt bag,’ which was originated on, if I am not mistaken, the TV series “Hill Street Blues.” When all is said and done, I think the movie is an exotic popcorn movie from India, made by Brits, about the Mumbai slums, a city within a city, that focuses on a young couple in a rags-to-riches fantasy/romance that could never happen because the Quiz program would never put someone from the slums on the Millionaire program, or at least so I have read online. The slum dwellers are on the bottom of the Indian caste system. The movie is designed to play “Let’s Pretend,” so everybody could go home from the movie feeling warm and fuzzy. The squalor of the slums is for the most part turned into scenery for the foreground sweet romance between two young people that is suppose to transcend the filth and smell of the tanneries in the slums, which of course the movie can’t convey.
There is a clean and rinse quality to “Slumdog.” While the narrative deals with the eventual romance of the sweet, becoming couple, neither of whom were nominated for anything, although the young woman could be in a beauty contest, she was that attractive and also physically unmarked by poverty, the squalor and poverty of the shacks of the people who live there in frozen perpetuity remain out of sight of the Quiz program part of the story, where the boy-hero wins his chance to win the lottery—and the girl. And to live, I suppose, happily ever after, as members of the middle class.
Slumdogs around the world, dream on!
To me there is something exploitive about the movie, like the British are still at it in India. It weaves in and out of the narrative and taints its innocence and effulgent glow.