Hyped

Monday, 12th January 2009

I hate to spoil the Golden Globes party, but isn't it time for someone to point out that "Slumdog Millionaire" is weirdly over-rated? I went to see it on Saturday night, and ever since I've been wondering how such a superficial piece of work has managed to whip up so much publicity. Yes, it was a fantastic achievment to get a low-budget effort off the ground, and yes, the children (as opposed to the adults) do deliver heart-warmingly energetic performances.

But why are the reviewers so eager to overlook the flaws? Danny Boyle's movie wants to be a thriller, yet it gives us embarrassingly one-dimensional characters and a risible boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl storyline. It also wants to be a fairy-tale, but it's so busy digging around in Bombay's grime that it doesn't work at that level either. Even a melodrama needs a decent plot. And so, to distract our attention, Boyle delivers a relentlessly manic flow of images; it's one long, loud and shallow MTV video. While the early scenes with the street kids have real charm (the latrine incident is beautifully handled, for instance) the movie goes downhill once the adolescents and adults take over. I agree that it's cheering to see the new, globalised India portrayed on the commercial screen, but for all the talk of how the city is the star, Simon Beaufoy's script gives the impression he spent an afternoon in a Hilton poring over a copy of the Lonely Planet Guide to India. (Just for the record, my wife, who's Indian and knows her Bollywood, was as bored as I was.)

Yet the reviewers fall over themselves to shower the film with accolades. They did the same with the equally lightweight "Bend It Like Beckham", which makes me wonder whether the sight of brown skins does something odd to their critical faculties. Actually, it can't be that, because they seem to have equally skewed opinions about such pseudo-sophisticated tosh as "Atonement". No wonder I keep promising myself I'm going to give up going to the cinema. I didn't go in hoping to encounter a asterpiece. I just wanted to be entertained (as I was by the marvellous "Son of Rambow", a film which pulls off the difficult trick of making children seem like, well,
real people. "Slumdog Millionaire" has its heart in the right place, but it has straw for brains.