Dickens In Mumbai
Author: Roy Anker, professor of EnglishBooks and Culture
Posted on: Mar 9, 2009
When British direct or Danny Boyle hits his mark, no matter the genre, hardly anyone moves a story better. That is surely the case with Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, the dazzling, if predictable, tale of an teenaged slum kid who by wild fluke ends up on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Not in a long while has a foreign film from anywhere gotten such praise—and it comes via Bollywood at that, and with a Brit director to boot. But does Slumdog boil down to little more than a cinematic hustle, pulled off by the exhilarating finesse of a “blithely glib entertainer” (as one critic put it)? Or might this be a story worth telling, made the more so by Boyle’s stylistic pizzazz?