Ignorant fool that I was, I had fully expected a "small" film, so the grand scale of the movie that greeted me (and lingered long) was anything but. The vividness of the story was breathtaking (the squalor! the beauty!) and the path it took certainly had me glued (very Dickensian, according to a friend).
I had no plans of watching and was, initially, just taking peeks at the screen, but the poetic depiction of the ugliness in the brutal, truer-than-life scenes--slaughter, the slums, hunger, crime--turned the peeks to awe-struck (no exaggeration intended) attention. And the rest, as they say, is history.
The unconventional treatment of the material and the cinematic effects employed were some of the tell-tale signs that it was fiction. The acting, though, was so superb, it didn't seem like acting, at all. Until now, I am still prodded to ask whether, indeed, Dev Patel, et al, were really just acting.
(Dev Patel as "Jamal Malik" and Freida Pinto as "Latika")
Could it have been their lives that were being lived in those frames?
(Director Danny Boyle and actress Freida Pinto)
This Danny Boyle film deserved its Golden Globe Award and you'll definitely be missing a lot if you don't watch it.
So, go. Watch. Now.
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