And The Oscar Goes To, or, There's a Sucker Born Every Minute: Thoughts on Slumdog Millionaire

For me the Academy Awards are forever entwined with memories of playing with action figures in the family room as my mother sat and watched the movie stars roll in on television.

“There’s Cary Grant. There’s John Wayne. There’s Jimmy Stewart,” she would say. “How old they all look.”

There were no VCRs or DVDs or DVRs in those days, and not even an AMC or TCM, so not only did you not see Old Hollywood every day, but you rarely got to see the old movies; though you could often catch one of the old warhorses yucking it up on Johnny Carson, the Oscars were the one chance a year to see them all in their best digs and toupees. Back then, at my young age, I had no real awareness of any of those people, but their names possessed some totemic magic. The Oscars were something Important to watch on TV, like the State of the Union address or Dick Clark on New Year’s Eve. And at the end of the evening, a council of wise elders would bestow immortality upon a movie that surely deserved it.

Now not only are the last vestiges of Old Hollywood vanished, but most of the “stars” who show up for award nights are barely distinguishable from the celebrities on The Surreal Life. And of course most of us have recording devices, the Internet, and a multitude of channels, so these lesser lights are ever-present—and thus, lesser.

My childhood notions of the Oscars as sacred secular event began to crumble as I grew older and watched Raiders of the Lost Ark lose to Chariots of Fire, and then The Right Stuff lose to Terms of Endearment. Later still, as I delved into the great movies of old, I learned that Peter O’Toole had not won for Lawrence of Arabia (or anything else), nor Al Pacino for The Godfather Part II. Alfred Hitchcock never won. Oh, but Oliver! did, and Around the World in 80 Days, and then, much to my dismay, execrable crap like Forrest Gump. The Academy managed to award Paul Newman and Al Pacino and Martin Scorsese for lesser efforts, clearly to “make up” for past mistakes (though obviously O’Toole, one of the very best actors of his generation or any other, will most assuredly never win even if with his dying breaths he delivers a King Lear that endures until our sun goes nova). The Oscars are a simulacrum of meritorious honors, honoring simulacra. But hey, that’s show business.

Which brings me to this year’s winner. I saw Slumdog Millionaire at Ragtag Cinema, a nice indy/foreign theater here in downtown Columbia. Comfortable seats, good-sized screen, clear sound. Before or after or during the show, you can enjoy a glass of pinot along with sandwiches and desserts, no doubt made from organic ingredients. Catering to the type of people who consider themselves lovers of “film” rather than lovers of movies. Though it activates my reverse-snobbery sense, all in all it’s a very nice place, and I’m certainly in favor of its existence.

So my wife and I bought our tickets, and we sat down to watch what was all the rage with the indie set, and lo and behold, I discovered that but for its trappings, Slumdog is a perfectly enjoyable, perfectly conventional movie, and nothing else.

The character of Latika is completely two-dimensional; she’s a dream, a goal, nothing more. Freida Pinto, who plays the adult Latika, has little to do other than stand around looking drop-dead gorgeous, a task she performs admirably. At times she’s as breathtaking to look at as Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, or Catherine Zeta Jones in The Mask of Zorro, but profoundly less interesting than either. There’s no there there. Latika’s no more developed than Megan Fox’s Mikaela in Transformers, and that may be a bit unkind to Mikaela. The brother is just as flat; usually cruel and unfeeling, he manifests kindness and something like brotherly affection only at the right plot points; the first time is understandable, the second, inexplicable—other than, of course, that it’s the movies.

When protagonist Jamal finds his long-lost love, he conveniently—and almost instantly—manages to get close to her so that we can be treated to the following exchange:

“Come away with me,” Jamal says.

But what have you got? Latika asks.

“Love.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake. Rocky is more poignant. This is French Kiss territory, but more uneven; there’s a horrific scene early on, so terrible that it’s hard for anything else that happens in the movie to match it, and nothing does. After that point we’re hurled along a plot as preposterous as anything ever dreamed up by MGM, implicitly acknowledged by the dance number at the end. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; the point is, this is romantic fantasy, with the Mumbai train station as stand-in for the Empire State Building.

As I sat and watched, I couldn’t help wondering if many of the viewers around me would ever deign to watch a movie that revolved around Who Wants to be a Millionaire? but set in Los Angeles and starring Steve Carrell and Elizabeth Banks. Perhaps they’d catch it on HBO, or when it showed up on TNT, but they’d never see it on a Friday night with the Great Unwashed, what with the cell phones lighting up like fireflies across the theater and the floors sticky from old spilled soda. And yet if Slumdog were a software app, its “India”--would be a “skin,” easily switched out for “China,” “Brazil,” or “Egypt.” Or “New York.” Or “Tattooine.” But oh, how that “skin” does the trick. As Christian Lander might say, ordinary white people like Sleepless in Seattle, but really advanced white people like Slumdog Millionaire.

As I said, I enjoyed it. I didn’t feel I’d wasted my money, and that’s rare these days. Escapism has its place, and if I were to write off Slumdog for being escapist, I’d have to write off Raiders and The Guns of Navarone and Midnight Run, which I don’t want to do. I’m just amused—though not surprised—by how the latest rags-to-riches tale has earned its spot in the grand spectacle, and I’m rather confident that, once the sheen has worn off, Slumdog Millionaire will take its place alongside the likes of Titanic and Rain Man and the other curiosities that pressed all the right buttons at the time but for the life of us, we can’t remember why. It’s a fun little movie; we’ve seen it all before, and we’ll see it all again, but if we’re distracted for a few moments, perhaps that’s enough. Hey, that’s show business.