Bombay and Son
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Bombay and Son An Anglo-Indian fi lm is Dickensian, in the best sense of the word. BY JOHN PODHORETZ Stunned and in a state approaching bliss, I sat through every second of the closing...
...We have lost the taste for him and his work...
...There are orphans and crooks, Fagins and Magwitches and Uriah Heeps, abandoned children, picaresque journeys, unlikely coincidences...
...But the parallels to Dickens are everywhere in the screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, which was taken from a 2003 novel called Q&A by an Indian diplomat named Vikas Swarup that was an international bestseller...
...It tells the story of an illiterate 18-year-old Muslim boy named Jamal working in an international call center in Bombay...
...And yet something magical happens in Slumdog Millionaire...
...As he explains the answer to each question, the story of his improbable life unfolds...
...These days, though, it matters little that Charles Dickens was the greatest prose stylist the English language has ever produced and wove as no one has before or since the disparate strands of classic storytelling—realism and fancy, the natural and the supernatural, psychological character study and broad comic caricature—into a glorious tapestry...
...They never fail to remind the viewer he is sitting in a theater or at home in front of a television...
...They are distancing...
...it allows readers to resist cheap manipulation...
...The panels shrunk, the windows cracked...
...It is one of the best movies I have ever seen...
...We are more inclined these days to share Oscar Wilde’s witty and mocking view of another Dickens character’s demise, that “one would have to have a heart of stone not to read of the death of Little Nell without laughing...
...Boyle’s previous work, most notably a black comedy about Edinburgh junkies called Trainspotting, and the zombies-inLondon horror fl ick 28 Days Later, is characterized by all manner of herkyjerky, up-to-the-minute visuals that usually have the opposite effect on a viewer from the cinematic techniques developed by Dickens...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ Stunned and in a state approaching bliss, I sat through every second of the closing credits of Slumdog Millionaire thinking about Charles Dickens, its artistic and spiritual progenitor...
...I think it’s because there is not a moment’s ironic detachment in his fi ction...
...but how all this was brought about, Scrooge knew no more than you do...
...In A Christmas Carol, for example, he describes brilliantly an image of time passing that would come to be called the “lap dissolve”: The Ghost smiled thoughtfully, and waved its hand: saying as it did so, “Let us see another Christmas...
...It is, rather, a bruising acknowledgment of the common tragedies of life, in which goodness and innocence are not enough to spare an angelic youth from the ravages of a harsh fate...
...I don’t want to say more about Slumdog Millionaire...
...Slumdog Millionaire makes the case that what we need now is a little more Dickens and a little less Wilde...
...It is possible to engage literary-minded people in a discussion of Anthony Trollope, or George Eliot...
...Among the British novelists of the 19th century, Jane Austen has grown so popular over the past two decades that a bestselling novel was written about a book club dedicated to her...
...Here, a few pages later, Dickens invents the “slam cut”: “Although they had but that moment left the school behind them, they were now in the busy thoroughfares of a city, where shadowy passengers passed and repassed...
...Scrooge’s former self grew larger at the words, and the room became a little darker and more dirty...
...Wilde’s ironic distance is a critical gift...
...The movie is structured as an interrogation by a police detective who is certain Jamal is a fraud...
...This is not only a heartfelt movie, it is a fi lm bereft of irony, one that takes the predicaments and woes and victories of its characters with the utmost seriousness...
...Bombay teems with vivid and wretched life just as London does in Oliver Twist and Little Dorrit, two books about the miseries of children who must either overcome their straitened circumstances or fall into corruption, despair, and death...
...His urgent, passionate, longwinded, crazily plotted, epic novels demand that we read them earnestly— that we not shy away from the sentimentality that drips from them, for example...
...He gets himself on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and is suspiciously successful...
...If he had been, Dickens would not have wept over Paul Dombey...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...Still, “Dickensian” is the last word I would have expected to apply to the work of the British fi lmmaker Danny Boyle, who made Slumdog Millionaire with the assistance of an Indian director named Loveleen Tandan...
...Dickens famously cried as he wrote the death scene of the saintly child Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son...
...fragments of plaster fell out of the ceiling, and the naked laths were shown instead...
...But it is also limiting, because Dickens is not resorting to an authorial trick in these cases...
...Does anyone read Dickens anymore...
...That is fi tting, since Dickens was the most cinematic of novelists, anticipating storytelling shortcuts that would be brought to fruition by the moving picture 75 years later...
...Why would this be...
...There have been more translations of Dickens to fi lm than of any other writer save Shakespeare...
...How is it that he, who knows nothing, can answer the questions posed to him...
...In some ways, Dickens actually taught fi lmmakers how to tell a story visually, even though he did it in word pictures...
Vol. 14 • November 2008 • No. 10
