Slumdog, a “Perfect Fairy Tale for Our Hard Times”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i76rpFOHJ1U[/youtube]

Frank Rich, writing for the New York Times, talks of why Slumdog Millionaire is currently capturing the hearts of audiences — this is a similar theory to one I floated in my last column a while back, The Audacity of Hope.

Who Wants to Kick A Millionaire, Rich’s piece, says about Millionaire:

It’s a virtuoso feast of filmmaking by Danny Boyle, but it’s also the perfect fairy tale for our hard times. The hero labors as a serf in the toilet of globalization: one of those mammoth call centers Westerners reach when ringing an 800 number to, say, check on credit card debt. When he gets his unlikely crack at instant wealth, the whole system is stacked against him, including the corrupt back office of a slick game show too good to be true.

We cheer the young man on screen even if we’ve lost the hope to root for ourselves. The vicarious victory of a third world protagonist must be this year’s stocking stuffer. The trouble with “Slumdog Millionaire” is that it, like all classic movie fables, comes to an end — as it happens, with an elaborately choreographed Bollywood musical number redolent of “Gold Diggers of 1933.” Then we are delivered back to the inescapable and chilling reality outside the theater’s doors.

And then he drops the other shoe – litany of complaints against our own corrupt system, our corrupt world and all of the evil anyone anywhere can muster. In Slumdog, evil (as with Dickens) seems to come from the streets more so than from the top down — though it’s a given that the top down corruption has always been there. In Slumdog, though, one kid decides not to give in to cheating, stealing, a life of crime in order to succeed — he does so for love. Of course, the fates are shining on him all the way through, which doesn’t happen to many. It’s an interesting piece by Rich and yet one more reason to believe that, indeed, Slumdog is the frontrunner in this race.