FILM: Slumdog Millionaire highlights moral decisions

Slumdog Millionaire feels like an instant classic because the film so deftly combines the distinctive visual and storytelling styles of noteworthy cinema with characters and conflicts that would be at home in great literature. (Indeed, Slumdog could be described as an adaptation of a Dickens novel set in modern-day India.)

A key reason why the three main characters are so timeless is that over the course of the movie, each embarks on an emotionally compelling faith journey. Slumdog's protagonist Jamal is primarily defined by his faith (though he sees this faith as "destiny" instead of the work of a specific higher power). Jamal's faith drives both his success as a contestant on the Indian version of the TV game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" (a success so unlikely for the orphaned, uneducated Jamal that it lands him in jail during his appearance on the show) and his greater purpose: to atone for his past failures by reuniting with his lovely childhood companion turned soulmate, Latika.

Jamal and the movie as a whole would be hopelessly shallow if he were nothing more than a trivia savant out to get a girl. Part of the genius of Slumdog's director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy involves how they weave incidents from Jamal's impoverished, even horrific upbringing in the slums of Mumbai and beyond with the scenes on the game show, revealing he has lived the answer's to the program's questions. Jamal hasn't just had faith granted to him – he has definitively earned it.

The film also chronicles how Jamal responds to the profound moral decisions he faces by refusing to allow his luckless, at times tragic fate to define him and instead choosing the way of abundant life and hope. Jamal's deeply ingrained morality and unshakable faith make him a truly irresistible hero.

Latika might be dismissed as a one-dimensional damsel in distress, but this view would sell her short. Latika has been enslaved throughout her life – by her social status and later her stunning looks as well as the cynicism that allows her to survive. But Latika also still possesses, however dimly, a childlike hope to find freedom and true love. It is in part through Jamal's example but mostly the growth of her own will to escape to something better than her current life that Latika dares to heal her own wounds and become fully whole.

Jamal's brother Salim presents the most problematic but perhaps the most rewarding and fully human of the three spiritual journeys. It is easy to dismiss Salim as the fallen villain of the story, a gangster who rejects Jamal (not to mention his faith and innocence) to embrace wealth and violence – and in the process, his own doom. But Salim is faced with the most agonizing moral decisions of anyone in the movie, most of which involve protecting himself and his brother from often-mortal danger. Salim's decisions may be self-serving. But they embody the compromises all of us must make in our lives – the compromises for which, like Salim, we long for forgiveness.

Perhaps surprisingly, Salim is the only one of Slumdog's three principal characters to embrace religion (in his case, Islam). One might question the sincerity of his faith at times. But Salim's belief fuels his hope for redemption, allowing him to make a selfless sacrifice that makes the movie's triumphant climax possible. The devoted innocent Jamal may seem like the most faithful and Christ-like character in Slumdog Millionaire, but in many ways the Muslim criminal Salim is truly the most Christian.

-- Donovan Jacobs is a Los Angeles-based film critic.