Whenever there's an overwhelming favorite in the Oscar race, you can be sure, human nature being human nature, and the media being the media -- in short, an institution that likes to build 'em up and then knock 'em down -- that the overwhelming favorite will soon find itself fighting off a nasty backlash.
That's exactly what's happening right now in the Oscar race to Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire," which in recent days has gone from beloved underdog to embattled front-runner. When I was on the phone earlier this month with Fox Searchlight marketing chief Nancy Utley, she wondered, perhaps wanting to get an outsider's perspective, how the movie was doing. At the time, I told her: "Not that you can really control it, but the only thing you have to worry about is peaking too soon."
I guess you can say the peaking has begun.
Alice Miles has a column in the London Times calling the film "poverty porn," hammering the writers and critics who've labeled "Slumdog" as a feel-good film when it is filled with "scenes of utter misery and depravity."
Time magazine posted a piece Monday saying the film was "no hit" in India, with only 25% of theater seats occupied (an assessment hotly disputed by distributor Fox Searchlight).
A number of Mumbai slum residents have objected to being labeled "slumdogs." My own newspaper had a front page piece, headlined "Indians Don't Feel Good About 'Slumdog,' " contending that "some Indians are groaning over what they see as another stereotyped depiction of their nation, accentuating squalor, corruption and impoverished if resilient natives."
And now Slate magazine has posted a withering assessment of the film by Dennis Lim, a regular contributor to both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, who scoffs at Boyle's "fairytale vision of squalid poverty," arguing that Boyle is guilty of "aestheticizing poverty."
Lim is a formidable essayist, whether embracing or attacking a film, so his words pack quite a wallop. His argument, in part, goes as follows: "A slippery and self-conscious concoction, 'Slumdog' has it both ways. It makes a show of being anchored in a real-world social context, then asks to be read as a fantasy. It ladles on brutality only to dispel it with frivolity. The film's evasiveness is especially dismaying when compared to the purpose and clarity of urban-poverty fables like Luis Bunuel's 'Los Olvidados,' set among Mexico City street kids, or Charles Burnett's 'Killer of Sheep,' set in inner-city Los Angeles. It's hard to fault 'Slumdog' for what it is not and never tries to be. But what it is -- a simulation of 'the real India,' which it hasn't bothered to populate with real people -- is dissonant to the point of incoherence."
