First off, Slumdog Millionarewas a freaking fabulous movie. It had everything– tragedy, comedy, suspense, true love, and a single Bollywood dance number. The cinematography was inspiring and the soundtrack kept you wired the whole time.
It was also very strange seeing the Indian slums outside of the pages of National Geographic. There was one beautiful shot from above the corrugated metal roofs of children running through the streets, and it kept cutting away to a the same moment of action from higher above, showing just how vast the slums are.
There was another moment that felt especially foreign to me– a part showing people working on a giant trash heap in a dump picking through the garbage to fill giant sacks with anything that could be ameliorated or sold. For a few seconds, I was struck by how different that experience is from that that I am lucky enough to have, and that most everyone I know is lucky enough to have, by the difference between life in America and life in India. But then I remembered that a few days ago I had seen an abandoned house, the final contents of which had been splayed out all over the front yard to be picked over before the bank’s agents cleaned it up for foreclosure sale. Crowds and crowds of people drove or walked up to pick through whatever the previous family had left behind– broken desk chairs, dirty pillows and sheets, old bags, an exercise ball, some televisions from the 1980s. Poverty is poverty, and while the motives of the people picking through the trash may have been somewhat different, and though the scales of poverty are numerically divided, the images were so similar it was hard to shake.
Slumdog Millionare was so much the sort of story we love to hear in America– the story of someone who starts out with nothing gaining everything, and touching a community in the process. Perhaps it was also the telling of the story of the American dream in India that put the image of the trash pickers (and so many other moments in the movie, for that matter) in close proximity to the stories and images of poverty in the West. We have more in common globally than we like to think, or often assume. Perhaps that is why Slumdog has gotten such rave reviews here in the States– we see that we have in common an archetypal story of rags to riches and also many things in common we need to work on so that rags to riches stories can become a mythological literature of the past.
This is a movie I want to see. I saw the trailer and the visual of that was enough to draw me in even without knowing what the story is about.
As for picking through someone else’s stuff: It’s not just poverty that has drives us. Some just like getting stuff for free. Others go through someone’s “leftovers” out of simple frugality and practicality, knowing how to make use of a bargain. In our culture, a lot of stuff is tossed out simply because it is no longer the latest model. And whoever was stuck with the abandoned house may have appreciated the help in getting it emptied.
[...] so I’m really going to have to see this movie. Everyone keeps saying it is fabulous and now The Academy says so [...]