Premise: A poor Indian man improbably becomes a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire champion.
I've been unfair to this movie for a lot of years. I looked at its success as taking away from The Dark Knight. And, it is true that Slumdog Millionaire won all the Oscars that year, but The Dark Knight wasn't even nominated. I really should be mad at The Reader instead. Anyway, that snub did lead to the "Dark Knight rule"* the next year, expanding the Best Picture nomination field with its own set of unintended consequences. It wasn't just the Dark Knight thing though that bothered me. Slumdog Millionaire was the last truly dominant Best Picture winner. It won Director, Screenplay, Score, Song, Sound Mixing, Cinematography, and Film Editing. And I think had they known that he was going to stick around this long, they would've nominated Dev Patel too. That puts it in rarified air. Only 7 movies have won more than Oscars than Slumdog Millionaire, and they are almost all classics. When I finally saw Slumdog Millionaire sometime in 2009, I was expecting something a lot better. The movie was fine, but it didn't blow me away. It sort of felt like Oscar voters just feeling guilty about the way poor Indians lived.
*The Academy refuses to recognize it by this name, but we know why it happened then.
In the years since, I think it's been assumed that I hated the movie since I have all these bugaboos about it. I didn't. Honestly, I barely even remembered it. So, I decided to rewatch it to see how my opinions are changed. However, I remain as indifferent to the movie as before. It's a slightly more accessible City of God, as far as I'm concerned, and the poor street child in India thing has been done better since with another Dev Patel movie: Lion. Slumdog Millionaire is good. As someone who plays weekly pub trivia, I do relate to a story about figuring out how a person knows an answer: the crazier the connection, the better. Dev Patel and Freida Pinto have pretty obvious star potential in it. I appreciate that closing credits song and dance sequence a lot more this time. And there is something amazingly evocative about the title "Slumdog Millionaire". It's a shame that it's taken on a somewhat racist connotation over the years, but I think it would've entered the lexicon regardless of what it's about. That's a great title.
So no, I definitely don't hate the movie. I'm just not a huge fan. It's a reasonably effective movie. I think the credits sequence won it the Oscar. That's the part that got me pumped, not the actual ending to the film. That then annoys me, because I wonder why no actual Bollywood films have broken through since then. It still feels a bit like its success is tied to voters being like "Oh my, is that how people really have to live in India?" I know what's not the movie's fault, but it is annoying.
The weird thing is, it's hard for me to find an Oscar win I strongly wish went in another direction that year. I don't love any of the other Best Picture nominees. I mean, maybe Milk would've been a nice winner. It would be nice for David Fincher to have a Best Director Oscar, but The Curious Case of Benjamin Button isn't one of my favorites of his. And, if I'm looking at it as a career Oscar, then Danny Boyle has earned it for his career just as much as Fincher. I could possibly argue Doubt for screenplay. But it's not a year where I felt like Slumdog Millionaire's success was taking away from something great. It was just a weak year and it took advantage.
In other words, I think I still have the same irritations about Slumdog Millionaire that I had before the rewatch. At least now I know that my indifference to the movie in general is warranted. It's the quickest we've forgotten any Best Picture winner in recent memory.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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