Slumdog

I rented and watched Slumdog Millionaire. I enjoyed the movie. However, it is shocking to see the poverty and relentless brutality portrayed and the viewer cannot hide from seeing the way many children must live in a nation like India. Made me count my blessings.

I was cheering throughout the movie, that the Slumdog would win in the end. It is very well put together, to keep a viewer interested, with flashbacks interspersed with the game show. The flashbacks show how he came to know an answer, in his brutal lonely childhood in the slums, where he and his best friend struggled to survive by hustling.

After the slum dwellers are attacked and the slums burned by another class, and his mother killed, the two boys live in a garbage dump with an orphaned little girl. They are taken in, along with other slum orphans, by a group of men whom at first seem intent on caring for the children and teaching them to sing.

However, once a child can sing a song well, the two boys discovered, they would be blinded with acid, and sent out to make money for the men, by singing and begging blind on a street corner. The boys and little girl try to escape. The boys are able to leap onto a moving train but the little girl is left behind.

The flashbacks are shown as Raman, now a young adult, deliberates the question.

He is accused of cheating with one question left to the million, and hauled to the police station where he is brutally tortured in attempts by police to extract a confession. Further flashbacks there, as he relates to the police how he knew an answer, fill in his life story.

In the end, he is taken back to the game show, now a hero to millions, for the final question that would make him a millionaire if he answers correctly. Meanwhile, the girl from the slums, whom he has always loved, who has been intertwined in his life, is enslaved to the mafia like criminal whom Slumdogs childhood best friend now works for.

His friend makes a sacrifice that will cost him his life. He gives her the keys to his car, and helps her escape the compound of his boss, her enslaver, to go to be, finally, with the love of her life.

This movie is hard to watch, but I loved it.