Slumdog Millionaire is a movie about a young man named Jamal Malik that got a chance to go on the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Unexpectedly, Jamal does really good with answering the questions and winning more money so they suspect him of cheating. With every right answer for Jamal, except for one, comes a memory of how he learned the answer while growing up in the hardships of the slum of Mumbai with his brother Salim and his childhood friend Latika.
While reminiscing on his past, Jamal shows how he and his brother met Latika and how they had to steal and connive money out of people in order to make a living for themselves after they ran away from a man named Maman who tricks children into coming to work for him before turning them into street beggars and singers, a crime known as child trafficking. Over the years Latika is kidnapped at least twice and Jamal’s final attempt to reach her was to join the show because he knows that she always watches it, wherever she may be.
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"Slumdog Millionaire Review".
This film has received both good and bad critical reviews because of how it interprets Mumbai and the Indian culture. Director Danny Boyle and screenplay writer Simon Beaufoy wrote that they made the production was made of “a street child’s world from the child’s own point of view”. A historical issue that this film, and others like it, depicts is the issue of global poverty and the growth of more “slum” neighborhoods. Dharavi, which is known to be Asia’s largest slum, is in the middle of Mumbai where the film is based. Dharavi has been a place that has seen the worse after going through the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992, a prominent place of worship. In the movie, Jamal’s mother is killed during one of the riots caused by this event.
This is one of the events that led to the violence buildup of this slum, which only, at the time, added to the hardships and poverty that it had already been facing. Over the past 60 years, opposed to the many years Dharavi spent as the bottom of the barrel slum, it has grown from a small village to boosting in its economic development, even with the riots and the aftermath. Fortunately, Dharavi is one of the slums that isn’t recessing like others. According to a report from the United Nations, population growth and urbanization are creating more slums, which has been reported to double by the year 2030. In Africa and Asia, slums are growing by more than a million people every week. (Sebastian 197)
What this movie has done is created an awareness of the poverty that goes on in the world. There are hopes that the rest of the world will come together to share their wealth to bring an end to these slums before the problem gets worse. The film is very insightful for those that did not know that these slum neighborhoods and global poverty all around the world existed. Filmmakers took a brave stance on the issue and accepted the criticism that came along with making the film in order to get their point across.
In my opinion, I believe the film did its job in letting us know what was going on in the world at the time, even though it was fictional but based from a book (Q & A by Vikas Swarup) that was based on a true story. If these problems existed in our history then we need to know how to solve the issues so that history doesn’t repeat itself. Slum villages and neighborhoods could be avoided if we all came together to help the cause that has been brought to our attention by this film.
- Sebastian sdb, A. J. “Studying Slum-Subaltern In Recent Indian Fiction And Celluloid: The Case Of Slumdog Millionaire.” IUP Journal Of History & Culture 4.1/2 (2010): 179-198. Humanities International Complete. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.
- Sharma, Alpana. “Slumdog Millionaire: The Film, The Reception, The Book, The Global.” Literature Film Quarterly 40.3 (2012): 197-215. Academic Search Complete. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.
