Slumdog Millionaire

I’ll keep this simple: Cancel whatever you’re doing tonight and go see “Slumdog Millionaire” instead. Yes, you, the girl obsessed with “Twilight” and the guy still hung up on “The Dark Knight.” Take the grandparents, too, and the teenagers. Everyone can play.

You’ve never heard of the actors. A third of the film is in Hindi. Much of it takes place in the most fetid, poverty-ridden corners of the Indian subcontinent, and most of it isn’t nice. Yet this sprawling, madly romantic fairy-tale epic is the kind of deep-dish audience-rouser we’ve long given up hoping for from Hollywood. “Slumdog” is a soaring return to form for director Danny Boyle (“Trainspotting”), but mostly it’s just a miracle of mainstream pop moviemaking – the sort of thing modern filmmakers aren’t supposed to make anymore. Except they just did.

Unfolding with the scope and brisk energy of a Dickens novel transplanted to Asia, “Slumdog Millionaire” is the tale of Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), a lanky, sad-faced Mumbai slum kid who, when we first meet him, is poised to win 20 million rupees on India’s version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” He has already aced the first rounds; tonight, the entire country will be tuning in to hear his final answer. The show’s host, a blow-dried slickster played by Bollywood superstar Anil Kapoor, is not happy. So much so, in fact, that he has arranged for the local cops to give the kid a working-over.

Is Jamal a genius? Is he a cheat? How would a young man with no education and a life on the streets know whose picture is on a US $100 bill? That’s what a police lieutenant (Irrfan Khan, the father in “The Namesake”) hopes to beat out of him. When torture doesn’t work, he sits the boy down in front of a videotape of his appearances on the show and demands to know, question by question, how Jamal did it. And thus an entire life unfurls before us, as does the history of modern India itself.

Boyle, working from Simon Beaufoy’s adaptation of a novel by Vikas Swarup, gives us Jamal’s unsentimental education in head-spinning, vertiginous flashbacks that become the main story line. Each answer on the TV show becomes a key that unlocks another chapter of the boy’s past, a pat narrative device kept from cliche by the deft, vital filmmaking.

The first sequence, prompted by a question involving a famous Indian movie star – the sort of factoid any Mumbai kid would know – shows the hero’s early years as both horrifying and exuberant. Jamal (played as a child by Ayush Mahesh Khedekar) and his brother Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail) take their desperate existence as merely the soup in which they swim; Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle visualize that soup with an astonishing pullback that reveals the vastness of Mumbai’s tin-roof chaos.

The siblings’ innocence, such as it is, ends when their mother (Sanchita Choudary) is killed in the anti-Muslim riots of 1992-93 and they take to the streets, picking up an urchin girl named Latika (Rubina Ali) in the process. The three small musketeers are taken in by a smiling villain (Ankur Vikal) who runs a school for child beggars; what this Fagin does to create an extra-special line of underage street singers marks the grueling nadir of “Slumdog Millionaire,” yet the movie, knowing such things happen, doesn’t let us look away.

The trio grow into adolescence and young adulthood, by which point the brothers have chosen their respective paths. The adult Salim (Madhur Mittal) has gone for quick cash and gangster glory; Latika (Freida Pinto) is the kept plaything of a mobster boss (Mahesh Manjrekar). Jamal has found work as a gofer at one of the new Mumbai’s energetic, youthful call centers. He serves tea, absorbs everything around him, and, when needed, dons the headset to deal with cranky old ladies in Scotland.

Good brother, bad brother, childhood sweetheart torn between the underworld and true love: We’ve all been here before. Warner Brothers and MGM used to dine out on this stuff in the 1930s, with actors like Jimmy Cagney and Pat O’Brien and Ann Sheridan in the roles. Boyle cherishes the tale’s popcorn durability, though – it’s an old story because it works – and his team retrofits it, polishes it up, and sets it careening.

Mantle’s images and Chris Dickens’ editing are infused with the go-go colors and rhythms of the subcontinent; the co-direction by Loveleen Tandan adds to the sense of teeming sensory overload; the music keens with beauty and corn. (Even the subtitles feel fresh, popping up like speech balloons all over the screen.) The characters are archetypes draped with specifics of time and place and, in Jamal’s case, of character. As Patel plays him, he seems too studious – too inward-directed – to be the hero of such a big movie, yet that’s why we come to love him. In the rushing slipstream of “Slumdog Millionaire,” he’s our anchor.

This sort of headlong melodrama has long since dropped out of fashion in our irony-drenched age, and some audiences, I’m sure, will turn up their noses. There have been grumblings that the film’s just too pretty, and that a movie about India directed by an Englishman can’t be taken seriously. Allow me to float the idea that it’s possible to talk yourself out of intense moviegoing pleasure.

And “Slumdog Millionaire” is a pleasure, as Jamal negotiates every obstacle before him (including, in one nerve-wracking turn of events, a psychological showdown with Kapoor’s preening host), and teeters between intelligence, luck, and a destiny that he has in large part made for himself. In his story, the movie implies, is that of an entire modern nation. After the dust has settled, the Bollywood dance scene that explodes under the closing credits feels both incongruous and earned: Young India kicking up its heels.

You may even feel like dancing in the aisles yourself. Sure, the real world doesn’t always work this way. Have you forgotten that this is one of the reasons why we go to movies in the first place?

 

Yes Man

 

In “Yes Man,” Jim Carrey plays Carl, an antisocial Los Angeles bank-loan officer who agrees to stop saying “no” – to friends, strangers, co-workers, the homeless; to fun, life, Mormons, even the horny old lady (Fionnula Flanagan) in his apartment complex. He twists, shouts, does a round of Dance Dance Revolution, plans a bridal shower, attends what must be the last rave in California, learns Korean, goes to a Harry Potter costume party, and courts Zooey Deschanel.

Yet the joys of affirmation appear lost on Carrey, who never looks truly happy. It’s entirely possible that I’m projecting my forced smiles onto Carrey’s face. But he seems to hold this entire exercise (it is, alas, a workout) in contempt. Perhaps he thought he was through with these high-concept, one-note comedies, having failed to top the physical genius of “Liar Liar” in 1997, and having made a mild breakthrough of sincerity in 2003’s “Bruce Almighty.”

While Carrey was off exploring his dramatic range in movies as radically different as “Man on the Moon,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” and the execrable “The Number 23,” the landscape for movie clowns changed. He does not belong to the fraternity that has come to dominate Hollywood comedy in this decade. Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Owen Wilson, on one hand, and the writer-director-producer Judd Apatow, on the other, share a franchise on the genre. It’s strange to say, but Carrey is an outsider in a rambunctious style he helped create. For “Yes Man,” he turns in what feels like a Jim Carrey impersonation – 104 minutes of high-energy heartlessness.

The gist of it all is that Carl must carpe his diem. He attends a seminar led by a yes guru (Terence Stamp, comically smug) where everyone around Carl is happy (or something like it), so why shouldn’t he be, too? In our pharmaceutical age, there’s probably a great farce to be made about emotional conformity. This movie, directed by Peyton Reed and adapted from Danny Wallace’s novel by three writers, feels made from quirky-comedy instant mix: just add heart. It’s a cynical attempt, ultimately, to make obnoxious people palatable by throwing them into a tub of romantic comedy.

Casting Deschanel as The Girl is not the wonderful stroke it once was. Between this film and “The Happening,” she seems more warmed over than Carrey. Deschanel glides through “Yes Man” with a cute haircut and cuter clothes, fronts a band called – quirk alert #1! – Munchausen By Proxy (they have a semi-funny song about booty calls), and – quirk alert #2 – teaches a jogging photography class. We’ve seen her scoot through this part before in “Elf” and “Failure to Launch.” There are probably a dozen better ways for her to spend her time (although few as lucrative), so it seems too soon for her to be on autopilot. For one thing, where’s her “Yes Woman”?

That, of course, is the biggest problem with this movie – not that it’s mediocre, dull, or barely written (though it’s guilty on all counts). It’s that Carrey himself is miscast. This is a star-making part as opposed to a part for a star committing a repeat offense. I watched Carrey ride a Ducati motorcycle in a hospital gown during the climax of this movie and thought about how much more fun it would have been to see a fresher face (Michael Cera’s, Robert Pattinson’s, or Paul Dano’s) do that and all of Carl’s exclamatory slapstick, to see someone care enough to make a character out of this.

If Carrey looks resentful or bored, it may be because he’s made things too easy for himself. He doesn’t have to worry about breaking character in “Yes Man.” He’s not playing one.

 

Nothing Like the Holidays

“Nothing Like the Holidays” offers proof that canned ham can still taste pretty good. A Latino entry in the weathered home-for-the-holidays genre, the movie leaves no cliché unturned, but the enthusiasm of the players and the genuine fellow feeling that courses through the story fan a few new flames from the smoldering Yule log. Next to a garish plastic Santa like “Four Christmases,” this is a handmade ornament – not very elegant but you’re glad to hang it on the tree anyway.

Not every Hispanic and Latino actor in Hollywood has been given a part here – it only seems that way. Actually, there’s a ringer at the head of the table: the British-born Spanish/Italian actor Alfred Molina as Edy Rodriguez, Chicago bodega owner and paterfamilias to a large, fractious Puerto Rican clan. Arriving home for Christmas are his three children: Iraq war vet Jesse (Freddy Rodriguez), struggling LA actress Roxanna(Vanessa Ferlito), and Wall Street honcho Mauricio (John Leguizamo), the latter toting his yuppie bride, Sarah (Debra Messing).

At first, “Nothing Like the Holidays” looks like it’s going to set up the Anglo for potshots: Sarah is a tightly coiffed ice cube who barely speaks Spanish and doesn’t want kids. Yet director Alfredo de Villa and his writing team (Alison Swan, Rick Najera, Robert Teitel) throw gentle curveballs throughout.

When mom Anna (Elizabeth Pena) announces her intention to divorce the wayward Edy at the dinner table, the family freaks out in unexpected ways. Powerbroker Mauricio falls apart completely while his wife turns out to know more of the family secrets than she’s letting on. (You’ll guess the big one before anyone in the movie does.)

Meanwhile, Jesse has to come to terms with his Iraq traumas while trying to woo an ex-flame (Melonie Diaz) and Roxanna needs to decide whether the Hollywood C-list means more than local sweetheart Ozzie (Jay Hernandez), himself dealing with a street-revenge subplot. The ribbons are laid out with care and the cast acts like they’ve never tied them into bows before.

The tartest performances come from the ever-reliable Pena – she invests every bit of business with sublimated fury – and Luis Guzman as a loudmouthed family friend, the jester who gets to say what the others can’t. At its most original, “Nothing Like the Holidays” implies there’s no greater force for conservatism in a Latino family than the children, desperate to hold together the illusion of clan while the parents deal with unpleasant facts.

The movie’s not really interested in originality, though. Instead, it wants to wrap the old seasonal homilies in the warm specifics of time and place and ethnicity. At that, it succeeds. Both despite its familiarity and because of it, “Nothing Like the Holidays” brings it home for Christmas.