Slumdog Millionaire

Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire is a good romance with enough drive to keep its more convenient plotting from becoming a constant irritation. We recommend it for its warmth and pace, with some reservations about the way it handles suffering. The television quiz supplies suspense, while Jamal’s search for lost love gives the questions an importance beyond money. Boyle commits to both with such confidence that there is little opportunity to ask whether they fit quite as neatly as Simon Beaufoy’s screenplay insists.

Dev Patel helps enormously as the older Jamal. His performance is direct and relatively unshowy, giving us someone to care about while the film is busy finding another way to quicken the pulse. The younger performers, including Ayush Mahesh Khedekar and Tanay Chheda as Jamal at different ages, make the childhood passages feel less calculated than the larger story. They bring an alertness to the hardship that stops these scenes becoming merely an explanation for the adult.

Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography makes Mumbai difficult to take our eyes off: strong colours, oblique angles and a camera keen to get close to the street. There is pleasure in that proximity, and enough visual information to make a second look worthwhile. Mark Digby’s production design keeps the quiz-show setting distinct from the streets, a useful clarity amid the rapid changes of scene. The city feels busy with lives beyond Jamal’s, which matters when his own story starts to seem too carefully arranged.

Chris Dickens’s editing is essential to the attraction and to the discomfort. He maintains a brisk pace without making the story difficult to follow, while A.R. Rahman’s music gives the movement an insistent beat. We were uneasy at how quickly scenes of poverty and violence became part of the same excitement as the quiz. The cutting and music keep urging us forwards before the distress has had time to settle. That does not cancel the pleasure, but it makes Boyle’s eagerness to entertain feel careless in places.

Beaufoy’s screenplay, adapted from a novel by Vikas Swarup, also asks a great deal of coincidence. Romantic fables can survive a few unlikely events, but here the conveniences sometimes make the characters’ choices feel secondary. Freida Pinto’s older Latika is appealing, but we wanted more room for her to exist beyond the importance she holds for Jamal. The romance depends heavily on accepting that importance, and Patel does more to persuade us of it than the writing does.

Boyle is on firmer ground when he trusts the simple demands of a romantic melodrama. He takes love and hope seriously, and Patel makes that earnestness easier to accept than it might have been with a more knowing lead. At 121 minutes, the film feels shorter, though a little less haste might have made the people fuller. Choose it for an evening of romance and suspense, provided a conspicuously helpful coincidence does not send you reaching for the remote.