Not Slumming with the Slumdog Millionaire
Being so tied up in the written word, I tend to get cross with film adaptations of books, too many of which attempt slavish translations of the 'important' scenes from said literary work at the expense of all the ephemeral detail and internal monologue and dialogue that make the book worth reading in the first place.
From The Lord of the Rings, which betrays many of the important character motivations in the book (and all of Tolkein's careful connections between creature and nature) and only treats the riders of Rohan as they deserve (mostly thanks to Bernard Hill's masterful portrayal of Theoden), to Atonement, which is a pretty, well-acted but utterly bloodless husk of Ian McEwan's novel, book adaptations tend to be shallow and aggravating. And the less said about the Harry Potter films the better.
Not so Slumdog Millionaire.I read the book it's based on, Q&A, on Saturday. It's a deft and charming Bollywood fantasy about a slum kid who makes his own luck, makes good and gets the girl and it's charming, socially aware, gripping and daft all at the same time. It piles on coincidence like the best Bollywood movies and is at times moving and horrifying. I read it because I was going to see the film the next day and I have always preferred to read the book first, so that I know what's missing.
In the case of Slumdog Millionaire, I needn't have worried - I could have read the book any time and not have it spoiled. Director and screenwriter have done a superlative job of making this a film that, whilst it is rooted in the book, lives and breathes as an entirely separate entity. Characters have been utterly changed to suit the new direction of the story and situations have been altered so that they make perfect sense in the film's narrative flow, without losing the horrible impact of the slums.
It's a mostly brilliant piece of filmmaking that has a personal coherence missing from too many other literary adaptations. The only thing that's missing from the film is the book's careful portrayal of how closely rich and poor are intertwined and how interdependent they are. Who'd have thought it possible that the film would be so good after the pig's breakfast that was The Beach? Danny Boyle seems to have learned his lesson.
Q&A and Slumdog Millionaire exist, for me, in a happy state of cousin-hood. One does not have to know both to enjoy the company of either. In fact, the only complaint I have is that the copy of the book I read has been renamed Slumdog Millionaire, in an obvious piece of marketing to increase sales of the book. The two are so separate that, like cousins, it is inadvisable for them to intermarry. But that's easy to fix with a trip to the secondhand bookshop for a pre-film copy of the book.If anyone reading this has any suggestions for other films that buck the adaptation trend, please post a comment...
