I’m going to start this review by patting myself on the back: I did not jump on the bandwagon to see this movie. I was more like a pioneer in seeing this movie; I was the Lewis and Clark of this movie. I had read about way before it was news, did some online detective work and found a free screening in town before it hit wide release. Jeremy and I saw it in Shaker Square back in December. I already knew the director, Danny Boyle (in short: Trainspotting, Shallow Grave, 28 Days Later and Millions), and the story sounded awesome. It’s about a young guy who grew up in the slums of Mumbai, India, who is participating on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and doing quite well. He’s doing so well that they believe he’s cheating, and demand that he tell them how he knows each answer. As he tells the stories, we learn about his rough childhood, including the girl he loved who he struggled to save from the streets. Anyone who reads my reviews is going to find out that I adore a non-linear narrative, flashbacks, any unconventional narrative device, really. Plus, this is a story set in India, and I have a fairly inexplicable, probably colonialist and un-PC fascination with all things Indian. I saw The Darjeeling Limited a bunch of times. I read Jhumpa Lahiri and Bharati Mukherjee and Kiran Desai. I get incredibly excited when The Amazing Race goes to India. I drink Indian tea. Anyway, I loved the movie; it was just what I expected and wanted to see. It was wistful and epic, heartbreaking and life-affirming all in the same moment. Some reviews have complained that this film relies too heavily on coincidence, and I always take issue with this point of view. I did it back when Signs came out (because in that case it wasn’t even coincidence, it was the hand of God, duh) and I do it every time we read a Dickens novel in an English seminar. As it happens, Slumdog Millionaire is hugely Dickensian. The young protagonist is orphaned and survives by his wits on the streets. He’s ambitious, and rises to a position of gentility, albeit an unsteady one. The love of his life, meanwhile, is in the clutches of an evil man. And through a series of increasingly unlikely coincidences, the protagonist and his love overcome their obstacles. The class struggle is classic Dickens, too—the effect of the Industrial Revolution on England made some men rich and gave the rest black lung. In Slumdog, the industrialization is equivalent to westernization. In one scene, the protagonist and his brother stand at the top of a building and look over the part of Mumbai which was once the slums where they lived and is now a solid mass of skyscrapers and condos. The characters may be “better off†now—they have regular meals, probably, and clean clothes and cell phones—but a part of their national identity has been lost, just like the employees in call center where the protagonist works use English names and accents. But all I’m really foregrounding here are the more sober elements of the film, and the fact is, it’s a lot of fun. There’s some violence that some reviewers got really squeamish about, but I’m pretty desensitized to movie violence thanks to Freshman Film class (1999) where we had to watch Full Metal Jacket and Alien and The Exorcist and The Shining etc., not to mention the Steven Seagal movies my dad had on the TV throughout my entire childhood. There’s dancing, there’s against-all-odds awesomeness. It was just amazing on all counts. The review in brief: Slumdog Millionaire for Best Picture!