Night Windows

There aren’t that many stories to tell. Perhaps that’s why so many filmmakers end up making the same film over and over again. In the films of directors such as Wes Anderson and Tim Burton, the names change, the sets change (to a degree), but they all inhabit the same meticulously fetishized world. Even when a filmmaker manages different stories, they usually resign themselves to one genre. A few make the leap, like David Gordon Greene, director of such introspective indie hits as George Washington and All the Real Girls, who helmed this summer’s Pineapple Express.

But rarely is there someone quite like Danny Boyle. Moving from 1996’s heroin comedy “Trainspotting” to “28 Days Later,” arguably the best horror film made since the death of Alfred Hitchcock, from the feel-good family-friendly “Millions” to the sci-fi thriller “Sunshine,” Boyle is not one to repeat himself. His latest film, “Slumdog Millionaire,” a semi-bildungsroman and a sweeping romance set against the backdrop of India, continues Boyle’s tradition of bringing a consistence of quality to his inconsistence of subject.

The film begins Jamal Malik (Dev Patal) being questioned (in a hold-your-head-under-water and car-battery-to-the-toes kind of way). He is suspected of fraud, being one of the first people ever to reach 10 million rupees on India’s version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.” The guard yells at him, asking him what he could possibly know that doctors and lawyers who tried before him didn’t. “The answers,” he says, “I knew the answers.”

And the answers are what guide the film. Sliding between the game show, the questioning, and bits of his life, we are driven by the answers. The detective (Irrfan Khan) asks him to explain how he knew each one, and each one elicits a story from Jamal’s childhood. Growing up in Mumbai, a poor “slumdog,” Jamal and his brother Salim went through nearly insurmountable horrors. Their mother was killed by anti-Muslim rioters, they were rounded up into child slavery, and they never knew where their next meal was coming from. Through much of this, Jamal had Latika, a girl whose parents were also killed in the riots. Their friendship and love drives Jamal and the film, giving him and us hope in an otherwise incredibly bleak story.

Jamal, Salim, and Latika are each played by three different actors. We see them change and grow, from children of around 7 to late teenagers. We see their lives played out in vingettes, each explaining where Jamal got an answer to one of the game show questions. When the game show host (who looks remarkably like George Michael) suspects that he, an uneducated teen from the slums of Mumbai, is cheating, he has the police called. Things for Jamal look as they have looked his entirely life: overwhelmingly bad.

But Boyle doesn’t let his characters or his audience remain discouraged for long. The importance of the film, or rather the meaningfulness behind the action is that from Boyle we’re given hope. The difference between hope and a happy ending is what drives the film, so that a pleasant outcome never feels guaranteed. We’re not sure how it’ll end, nor do we have reason to believe, given the life Jamal has led so far, that it’ll desirable. But what we do have is hope.