Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Christian Ethics and the Movies

Reviewed by David A. Thomas,
 Prof. of Rhetoric, Emeritus University of Richmond[i]

Globalization and Poverty

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

A.    He is Lucky. B. He is a Genius. C. He Cheated. D. It is His Destiny.

Slumdog Millionaire is everybody’s must-see favorite movie of 2008. A low budget film made on a shoestring budget of $15 million, it had already earned back $43 million within a month of its Christmas release. It swept nearly all the major awards (forty-two and counting) at all of the big movie festivals, including the Audience Award at Sundance, and Best Picture at the Golden Globes. As this is written, it is also in the running for ten Oscars. It is the heavy favorite to win Best Picture, Cinematography, Soundtrack, and Editing in a strong field of other artistic and dramatic masterpieces.

Succinctly describing the movie is not easy. Slumdog Millionaire is a story about a teenage orphan, Jamal Malik, from Mumbai’s great slum who becomes a winner on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Before being allowed to compete for the top prize, the show’s emcee accuses him of cheating. Else, how could the uneducated Jamal possibly know all those hard questions? He is hauled off to the local police station for interrogation (read: torture) to find out how he knew all the answers. The movie is told as a series of flashbacks into the boy’s life story, depicting how in each question, his life experiences gave him the answers, or the clues he needed to figure them out.

The movie is more than a screen version of an exciting TV game show. It is a coming of age story about the children of the slums, especially two orphan brothers and their best friend, an orphan girl, as they navigate the unimaginable suffering and horrors of growing up in the streets. Mentored only by older kids, and the crime lords who exploit the children in despicable ways, they get by on their wits as petty thieves, street beggars, and landfill scavengers. Slumdog is also a romance, a competition between the two brothers for the heart of the same girl with whom they grew up.

Slumdog Millionaire is a Bollywood movie hybrid. The Indian film industry produces twice as many movies as Hollywood. Bollywood movies are ethnic Hindi language films that depend on well-developed cultural traditions. The stories are derived from Hindu folklore and mythology. Upbeat music and dancing on a grand scale are expected. Until recently, kissing was not permissible on screen. Slumdog is more of a Westernized movie, in English, using some Bollywood conventions. Danny Doyle, the director, along with the writer and the producer, are all British. The leading actor, Dev Patel, who plays the young hero, Jamal Malik, is also British although he is an ethnic Indian himself. The rest of the cast are Indian, with veteran Bollywood stars in key supporting roles.

In the flashback scenes, Malik and his brother, Salim, and their friend, Latika, are all played by different sets of child actors selected from slum children auditions. One set represents the children at about age seven, and another set represents them at about age twelve. Danny Doyle used actual local children for those roles. He paid their movie fees into a trust fund to be distributed to them after they graduate from school (at about age sixteen), plus he arranged for their grade school education in the meantime.

The music is superlative. Pulsing to an intense percussive beat, two of its songs are Oscar nominees. Slumdog Millionaire depends as much on its soundtrack for its mesmerizing effect as Jaws relies on its signature Da-dum! Da-dum!  The scenic backdrops for the movie range through several eye-popping locations representing the odyssey of the children, as they ride the rails as hobos to the Taj Mahal (“Is this a hotel?”) to the sewers where they live, to the luxurious penthouse apartments of the Mafia bosses, to the Live India TV studio where the game show is taped. But mostly, the awful setting of the Dharavi slum itself is depicted in lengthy, graphic detail.

Cultural Implications. The chief significance of this movie is its consciousness-raising function. It is realistic to the point that many Indian movie critics and pundits object to the negative view it presents of India today. The Dharavi urban slum in modern Mumbai (formerly Bombay) is one of the world’s largest. Its population is estimated to be anywhere from 400 thousand to one million impoverished people, who live there without electricity, sanitation, or clean water. There are indeed many thousands of orphans who grow up in gangs. There are estimated to be as many as 25,000 child prostitutes. At the same time, Mumbai itself is a poster child for Western modernization, with constantly ongoing urban re-development on a grand scale.

Do You Want to be a Millionaire! is a symbol of the globalizing influence of Western culture and media on traditional East Asian values. Jamal Malik came to the attention of the show as a result of his serving as a tea wallah in one of Mumbai’s information technology centers that markets cell phones worldwide. On a deeper level, each and every quiz question comes with the same unstated subtext: It is plausible that even a Mumbai “slumdog” has familiarity with trivia subjects such as TV sports, movie stars, handgun manufacturers, and the presidents pictured on U. S. currency.

The two brothers typify the major options available to anyone on their life quests: Jamal is the archetype of the lily in the swamp; his older brother chooses a life in organized crime, with a tragic ending. The beautiful Latika, the childhood friend and ultimate love interest, is the anima, the feminine ideal, notwithstanding all of her unspeakably severe vicimage based simply on being an exposed and vulnerable girl.

Slumdog Millionaire is a fantasy in which the hero finds success and true love through winning his fortune on a game show. In the real world, can there be any hope for ameliorating the injustices and poverty that exists on such a massive scale? Readers of this journal may want to interrogate this movie through the lens of Christian ethics, and trace out what Jesus meant by the Sermon on the Mount, his Two Great Commandments, and his answer to the Rich Young Ruler’s most timely question, among many other teachings about ministering to the poor. Education, housing, and jobs, for instance, are more needed than a quick fix.

Basic economics teaches us that America’s affluent standards of living rest upon the manifest maldistribution of resources that result in deprivation on enormous scales throughout the developing world. In other words, we must give away more, and sacrifice more, than we have done heretofore—unless we believe that the destiny of the slumdogs everywhere else is God’s providential will as a necessary consequence of our enjoying our material blessings here at home.