I've always liked picaresque narratives. From Don Quixote to Candide to Huckleberry Finn (and even to Baron Munchausen, a favorite I maintain regardless of the fact that I've been criticized for it more than once), the style of humor specific to the picaresque tends to both make me laugh hardest and also to be the most memorable.
While Slumdog Millionaire isn't a textbook picaresque, it certainly has many of the elements. The main character, Jamal (Dev Patel) is written as a kind of modern day Indian Huck Finn, who survives by outsmarting corrupt adults. Part of the reason the picaresque form doesn't work so well for this movie is, however, that it takes place in India. The great charm of the picaresque is that it satirically exposes the subtle hypocrisies of the culture in which it takes place, often through the eyes of an "innocent" (mentally disturbed: Don Quixote; a simpleton: Candide; a child: Huck Finn) who, by virtue of his marginal social position, is able to turn the tables so that conventional opinions begin to appear strange and eccentric opinions appear to make more sense. Given that Slumdog Millioinaire takes place in a culture that is mostly foreign to American and European audiences, the subtle reversals of cultural logic required for a successful picaresque are absent. the problem is that the narrative space left over by the impossibility of making a Euro-American film about the subtle hypocrisies of Indian culture is filled in with a typical saccharine love story.
The melodramatic love story elements of the film have more to do with its self-conscious relationship to the Bollywood film industry. The result is a weird kind of friction between the two narrative forms. The first two-thirds of the film are a survey of Indian culture, demonstrating the great disparity between rich and poor and the influence of the mass media on the formation of Indian identity. This is done in a fairly heavy-handed way, but as I said, subtlety would likely not translate well for Euro-American audiences. The last third of the film is about the main character's quest to find true love. The relationship between social critique and melodrama is never resolved: true love finds its place for the characters and the social problems are all but forgotten by the end of the film. As the credits roll, the entire cast engages in a giant Bollywood dance number, which signals that the film found a generic solution to an organic problem. In other words, the strange, almost schizophrenic cut to the dance number signals that the conventional ending of the film was just that: convention. The characters do not resolve their problems; problems are resolved, but the narrative form itself is the agent of resolution. The result is that the ending feels artificial, hollow, an undercutting of all of the social critique that happened prior. Tacking on the dance number was a way for the director, Danny Boyle, to state his awareness of the disjunctive ending without making excuses for it.
The genre mash-up going on in Slumdog Millionaire is interesting, and might be its saving grace. Although I am a Danny Boyle fan, I don't believe this film will go down as one of his greatest successes. He made some pretty irritating directorial choices in this film, the greatest of which was underestimating the intelligence of his audience and our capacity for dealing with subtlety and contradiction.
I liked the soundtrack more than the film itself. The film itself was pretty good, but I think the blind faith that love will conquer all over the last third of the film was just too much to hope for, given the stark realism that pervaded the first two thirds of the film. So I agree with a lot of what you had to say here.
ReplyDeleteOne interesting possibility is that the film itself exists to critique the split of mainstream films into harsh "realist" pictures and those which have a more lighthearted and comedic ending. The juxtaposition of the two narrative arcs makes a demonstration of the idea that we could one day see a movie that artfully combined the two elements. But I dont think thats what Boyle was after, and, moreover, his own Trainspotting is basically a dark realistic movie that has a rather positive end to it, or at least the hope of some human do-gooding.