This isn’t the real deal. It’s Tetley’s Masala Chai
Will Heaven isn't convinced by Slumdog Millionaire
6 February 2009

Director Danny Boyle chooses melodrama instead of nuance or subtlety

A lanky, open-mouthed boy from Mumbai's slums has reached the final of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. How did he do it? The options flash up on screen: a) He was lucky b) He knew the answers c) He cheated or d) It is written. Two hours later, and there's no need to phone a friend. We have discovered that the boy's daring ingenuity has won him a peculiar knowledge. It's b) and yes, that is my final answer.

Wrong. I leave with nothing. Danny Boyle chooses d) It is written. The director of Trainspotting and The Beach has chosen not gritty reality, but fate and a melodramatic fairytale.

Before I get more indignant, I should say that there is so much that is right with Slumdog Millionaire. It is fast-paced and at times beautifully shot - credit to Boyle and his brilliant cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle. The child actors Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail are cute, funny and full of attitude (though, it turns out, horrendously underpaid). The film's music is fun, too. A R Rahman blends Bollywood vocals with Western dance beats, resulting in an energetic soundtrack which you might just want to go home and download.

But that's about as far as it goes. Most of the film's suspense, for a start, hangs on a game-show plot device - short interruptions of Dev Patel, mouth still open, answering another question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. It might be a fiction, but you are essentially on edge because you're watching a tacky game show. Granted, it's not as bad as Deal or No Deal, but the Indian presenter, Anil Kapoor, looks disturbingly like a subcontinental version of David Brent.

Danny Boyle deliberately chose Patel, he said in an interview, not to "display attributes of a character" but for the audience to "believe that [they] can all be inside [him] watching these events". Plainly Boyle thinks this is one of the film's strengths, but for me it's an admission of a glaring weakness. Ask for an amoeba and that's what you get - except in this case his spoken English improves and his skin colour gets inexplicably lighter as the boy grows older and wiser, veering dangerously towards racism.

I'm a huge fan of Bollywood films. Usually lasting around four hours, they are festivals of pantomime-style comedy, stunningly beautiful actresses, intermittent music videos and sensuous backdrops. Bollywood films are even popular in Pakistan, India's political arch-nemesis. But that sadly doesn't make Bollywood actors any good - they are either hammy and over-the-top or they are pouting body-builders. Take the fat policeman, for example. In every Bollywood film audiences laugh at the ineptitude of an overweight, clumsy policeman - it's a sort of cultural rebellion. But in a Hollywood film - as with Slumdog Millionaire - they look ridiculous and out of place.

And where does the word "slumdog" come from? Surely, you must be thinking, it is from a mixture of Hindi and English, one of those words that has grown organically from a colonial past and a caste-divided history. Nope. The word "slumdog" was invented by screenwriter Simon Beaufoy. He said this about Mumbai while writing his script: "Nuance doesn't stand a chance in the car horn symphony of a Mumbai traffic jam. So a torture scene is followed by a comedy toilet scene, the blinding of a child by a Buster Keatonesque stunt sequence. Tonally it really shouldn't work. In any other city in the world, I suspect it wouldn't work. But in Mumbai, not for nothing known as Maximum City, somehow I get away with it."

Sorry Simon, but you don't get away with it. You are way past melodrama's borders. Blown away by the exoticism of an "oriental" city, you've forgotten subtext and nuance at the cost of the film's integrity. No wonder the British Board of Film Classification classified the film as a comedy - its purpose is to amuse.

Perhaps, sympathisers will be thinking, there's nothing wrong with that. I disagree. The film's treatment of poverty is sensational and trivial. How funny is it that a small boy dives into human faeces in order to get an autograph? Not at all, but most of the audience was laughing.

Boyle wants us to believe that life in the slums is cheerful. He wants us to think that it will produce romantic boys who say, when trying to rescue their sweetheart, that they will "survive on love".

When we return to Mumbai (after the boys conveniently fall off a train next to the Taj Mahal) it has changed from "Bombay to Mumbai" - and the slums have been replaced by tower blocks. This is dangerously inaccurate. Seven million people are still thought to live in Mumbai's ever-expanding slums.

Slumdog Millionaire is unashamedly a feel-good film. It isn't a documentary-style exposé of poverty in India or a stylistically profound piece of work. It simply colonises new territory to achieve the audience's elation, choosing Mumbai to win us over.

But for me, going to see Slumdog Millionaire was a bit like going to a genuine chai stall only to find a white hippie selling Tetley's Masala Chai. Before you can turn it down, he adds two Canderel sweeteners and pours it down your throat. You protest, but everyone else seems to think it's the real deal.