Brit director Danny Boyle works again with youngsters dealing with their lot in life (drugs in "Trainspotting," saints and money in "Millions") as he combines the ugliness of Mumbai slums with the struggle for existence in a cruel, amoral society, along with a love story right out of the Hollywood 30s.
Jamal (Dev Patel) with his older brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) and an orphan girl Latika (Bollywood star Freida Pinto) face life in a slum society that is, to put it mildly, unkind to children. They barely survive from year to year, and at age 18 Jamal finds himself a star contestant on the Indian version of "You Want to be a Millionaire." The quiz show, the police drilling the young contestant for the source of his correct answers, and flashbacks to his early childhood (explaining coincidental situations in which information obtained builds a reservoir from which answers to the quiz show's questions are juxtaposed to reveal Jamal's uncanny ability to learn as he survives the rigors of his past. Before he approaches the final question he is brutally treated by the police who, convinced he cheated, try to force a confession from him. In flashbacks the romantic story weaves through memories of situations in which the answers are buried , and, as the girl, Latika (Rubiana Alli), now a raving beauty, wins his heart.

The ugly realism of the first 90-minutes of the film turns gradually in the final half hour into the sort of "they lived happily ever after" conclusion; boy gets both girl and the money, and they conclude their blissful rise out of the slums with a cheerful Bollywood song and dance with thousands of people in a densely crowded railway station.

Up to that point Boyle, who lived a year in Mombai soaking up the atmosphere while finding sufficient money to make a budget movie, felt ready to begin; with a cast and crew partially borrowed from a Bollywood studio, he gave us a documentary-like picture of the city's abysmal slums and its miserably poor people - crammed under tin roofs amid squalor and degradation of the worst sort, where only the fit survive.
Adapted from Vikas Swarup's novel, "O and A," by Simon Beaufoy (who wrote, among other things, "The Full Monty") and who introduced the telling statement about the boy's story as being "bizarrely plausible," the movie succeeds both with Boyle's inventive directing talents and his crew (including cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle with his Dutch angles and calculated focus on drab, earthy hues; and editor Chris Dickens, who weaves the flashbacks cleverly into the present at the quiz show). They aid & abet the story, making it seem almost plausible - that is, until the final romantic clinch and the anti-climactic song & dance at the railway station. By that time, one is almost willing to accept the swing from gritty realism to fantasy, sit back and enjoy, as we used to do back in the Depression era's escapist films.

The mostly Bollywood cast is more than adequate, with the youngest members from off the streets proving that kids are naturals in front of a camera. Patel's mostly immobile expression is enhanced by use of extreme close-ups, but he appears most in need of professional experience for emotional nuances; when not simply staring open-mouthed into the camera, his emotions are stereotypical, but, hey, who cares when everyone and everything else comes together so prettily by film's end?

What makes the movie most successful, beyond the Cinderella theme, is the fact that Boyle removes us from our ordinary lives to view, in his words, "the heartbreak of a country" - wide screen sweeping across it to rub our noses - antiseptically - into its miserable dregs - to focus on a few as they struggle, flee injustice, become trapped by their environment, but - ta-ta! - finally rise above it in true Bolllywood style. With a mix of indigenous and orchestrated music, he clinches the alien fascination. For two hours we are immersed in another world that is foreign and fantastic at the same time.