Great Movie

Slumdog Millionaire opens with two police officers brutally torturing a young man in India.  The boy is not talking.  Turns out the boy is a contestant on the TV game show Who Wants to be A Millionaire and he is close to winning 20 million rupees.  He is suspected of cheating.  Jamal is 18 years old, an orphan from the slums of Mumbai.  How could this uneducated boy who serves tea in a phone center possibly answer all these questions without cheating?

The answer to that question is the plot of the movie.  Flashbacks take us to points in Jamal’s life with his brother Salim and another orphan, Latika.  Jamal’s childhood crush on Latika turns into undying love and devotion.  He is convinced that they are meant to be together and that their love can overcome any obstacles.  Each flashback sequence supplies him with a valuable life lesson as well as an answer to the game show’s questions.

Through his life Jamal and his brother must make difficult choices about how to survive and who to trust.  Jamal learns the hard way not to trust “friends”, or authorities, or the powerful, or even family.  He trusts the power of love.  Because he trusts, he is willing to wait.  Yet, even while waiting everything he does is out of that love and the conviction of his destiny.

The contrasts in the movie are powerful- the rich and the poor, the good and the bad, compassion and self-interest.  This is a wonderful movie.