What a beautiful film.

Slumdog Millionaire is a rags-to-riches story set against the overpopulation and poverty of Mumbai, India. To describe it as rags-to-riches is to substitute cliche for precision. It is a covered-in-garbage-and-filth-to-riches story that ponders the essential nature of people, using two brothers with different priorities in life to explore how love can drive one to desperation, even at the cost of one's survival and wealth.

The film opens in media res, with Jamal Malik being brutally interrogated by the police. He is fresh off the Indian edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, and his success at the game has raised the suspicion that he cheated to get as far as he did. Although he made it to the penultimate question, he insists that he did not cheat, but that he knew the answers to almost every question. The policeman who interrogates him is unimpressed, given that the one question he couldn't answer without a lifeline was known by his own five-year-old daughter, but that Jamal was able to answer all the subsequent questions of increasing difficulty.

The Police Inspector sets up a TV to play back the video of the game, questioning him as to his knowledge of each of the questions, and what follows is a series of flashbacks in which we see Jamal and his brother Salim growing up surviving as street orphans in Mumbai (formerly Bombay). In seeing the hard-scrabble lives of the urchins, growing up around piles of trash and unmentionables (and sometimes covered in it), evading economic and exploitation by the adults around them, we see that each of the questions that Jamal answered is tied to a vivid childhood memory, usually a traumatic incident from their childhood. Most of these incidents, in fact, tend to focus on Latika, a female street orphan that Jamal develops a crush on, and his attempts to locate her after they are separated. These episodes also focus on the conflict that Latika generates between Jamal and Salim. Salim is the older and more aggressive of the brothers, and puts their survival and prosperity above all else, including Latika, even if it means coming to blows with Jamal. It is this conflict that will eventually come to a head in the film's final Act, when Jamal manages to land a spot on his country's Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?, not to win the money, but because he hopes that Latika, a fan of the show, will be watching.

The film is a heartfelt and beautiful love story, and although a third of the dialogue is in Hindi (during the scenes of the characters' early childhood), not for a moment did I feel any frustration at having to read subtitles. The film drew me in, investing me in the characters' lives, and in the tension of what would happen next.

I don't know difficult it will be for those of you not in big urban centers to catch this film, but if you can, and want to see a good film this year, catch this one. You won't regret it.

---NITS & NOTES
I don't have firm knowledge on this, but can street orphans who exclusively speak Hindi really learn to speak such perfect English by their teens?

Spoiler Nit (highlight to read):
I was surprised and touched by Salim's final act of sacrifice to give Latika her freedom, but when he said that he would "take care" of Javed, I though he would just kill him. Sure, he ends up doing so, but only after barricading himself in a bathroom, which leads to his own execution. Why didn't he just escape with Latika? No one seemed to notice Latika or the car gone until they heard her on the phone during the show's broadcast.

One nit that didn't occur to me until some time after watching the film and writing the above post: It's exceedingly unlikely that each and almost every one of the questions Jamal is given on Millionaire just so happens to be a piece of knowledge gleaned during one of the harrowing incidents of his childhood, and that he just so happens to remember those incidents as the source of the knowledge. Granted, he did have to use a lifeline for one of the questions, and an easy one, which not only reduces this implausibility somewhat, and also elevates the tension of the Inspector in thinking that he cheated, but it's still implausible. It's obviously one of the built-in conceits of the story that requires the viewer to suspend their disbelief in service of the story's romantic theme.

Regarding my nit above about Jamal and Salim speaking English, Asstant Professor Smitha Radhakrishnan of UCLA's Asia Pacific Arts touched upon that point here.

NANJAO -- Although this is (I think) a Bollywood production, the only big song & dance number is during the closing credits.

It's actually a British production. It was written by Simon Beaufoy and directed by Danny Boyle for the British production companies Celador Films and Film4. It is merely filmed and set in India.

The biggest thing the audience must accept is not only that Jamal gets all the questions based on his life's traumas, but the questions more or less align in CHRONOLOGICAL order to how his life plays out (i.e., the first question he learned as a boy and so on).

I'm also not sure how he gets the Colt question just because his brother had a Colt and shot people with it. How does knowing what a Colt is necessitate that Colt invented the revolver (unless that's the only name he recognizes, so he's guessing)?

LOL. Yeah, that's funny, Mike. Btw, he got all but one based on those traumas. He needed a lifeline for one of them.

Well, the ask the audience lifeline question did not involve any trauma. The one where he used 50/50 was on the soccer player which it is unclear if he had "learned" in the brief instance he saw whatever soccer player on the TV, so it's unfair to assume he would have learned that. Obviously, the final lifeline doesn't give him the answer either.

This film premiered on HBO the other night, and will play on the HBO channels through at least November 28. It's also available On-Demand through November 15. More here.

The set and music cues were exactly like the American version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. (Celador is one of the companies that produces the series.) Each level of questions has its own music cue. But, it seems that early on in the film, they tack part of the music cue for the second level of questions during a first round question.
Spoiler (although I don't think I'm giving too much away): I found it incredible that after Jamal has won the game's top prize, and goes to meet Latika at the train station the next day, no one recognizes him.