Summary
Mumbai, 2006. Jamal Malik is on the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? hoping to win a big prize, and he is in the final moments of the show, one trivia question away from winning. "How did he do it?" a supertitle reads. Different possible answers to this question appear: "A. He cheated, B. He's lucky, C. He's a genius, D. It is written."
We see him entering the stage to compete on the game show. Suddenly the scene shifts and we see him with a man who slaps him in the face and tells him to stop crying. Back on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, the host asks Jamal to say something about himself. The scene abruptly shifts back to the abusive man pushing Jamal's face into a bucket of water.
On the show, Jamal tells the host that he works for a mobile phone company, that he is an assistant at the company, that he gets tea for people at the company. The host keeps making fun of Jamal and his lowly professional position as the studio audience laughs. Jamal looks defeated and drained, and we suddenly see a vision of a beautiful woman smiling up at a train from the platform.
The scene shifts again and we see Jamal's torturers consulting about him. A younger man asks the older man who was abusing Jamal if he has confessed yet and is frustrated that all he's gotten is Jamal's name. Jamal is hanging by his wrists from the ceiling, and the older man, on the younger man's instructions, hooks Jamal up to an electric device used to "loosen his tongue." It is here that we realize the men are policemen trying to get Jamal to admit how he won the game show, asking him if he had an accomplice or anything that might have helped him win.
When Jamal says nothing, the younger policeman gets impatient and electrocutes him. "What if he did know the answers?" suggests the older policeman, which only makes the younger one more frustrated. The younger policeman is indignant; a kid from the slums has never won this much money. "What the hell can a slumdog possibly know?" says the younger policeman. "I knew the answers," says Jamal.
We see Jamal as a young boy reaching up to catch a ball in a game with a group of boys. A plane flies down low, disorienting Jamal and causing him to miss the ball, as the other boys chide him for his lack of athleticism. As some men on motorcycles begin to break up the game and yell at the boys for playing a game on the landing strips at the airport, the boys run away, running across roofs and through their village to avoid punishment.
Jamal and his brother, Salim, tease the authorities and run through an alleyway, where they run into a woman who scolds them. She tells the man who was chasing the brothers that she will take care of disciplining them. She brings them to the schoolhouse, where the teacher is leading them in a lesson about Alexandre Dumas' novel The Three Musketeers.
As the teacher sees that Salim and Jamal are in the classroom, he teases them for being the class' own version of the musketeers and throws the book at them. When they do not open the book fast enough, the teacher hits Jamal on the head with it.
Back in the present, the older cop is turning on a television as Jamal sits at a desk. The younger policeman comes in and they watch Jamal's episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. The first question is, "Who was the star of the 1973 film, Zanjeer?" The film goes back in time again, and we see Jamal sitting on a toilet in a public shack near the water. A man rushes up to the shack, urgently needing to use the toilet, and Salim bangs on the door to get Jamal to come out. Jamal is not ready to come out yet, so the man demands his money back, and Salim gets angry with Jamal for losing him money.
Suddenly a helicopter flies overhead, carrying the famous Bollywood star, Amitabh Bachchan. We see a montage of Bachchan's various films, then everyone in the slum begins running towards the helicopter. Running to go see the star, Salim locks Jamal in the toilet shack and Jamal beats on the door wanting to be let out. Jamal is a fan of the actor's, and pulls out a picture that he wants autographed. With no other way of getting out of the shack, Jamal jumps into the cesspool beneath the toilet and runs towards the movie star, holding up the photograph.
The crowds are disgusted by Jamal's dirty state as he walks up to the movie star and asks for an autograph. The actor signs his photograph and Jamal yells triumphantly. Later, Salim takes Jamal's photograph and sells it to the projectionist at the movie theater. When he comes out of the theater, Jamal yells at him, incensed that his brother would sell the autograph. "He offered a good price, so I sold it," says Salim, and Jamal looks at him angrily.
Back in the present, the policemen watch Jamal win on the show and Jamal says, "You don't have to be a genius." The television shows Jamal answering the next question—about the writing underneath the three lions in the national emblem of India. The question is exceedingly easy, yet Jamal uses his "Ask the Audience" lifeline to answer it. "My five-year-old daughter can answer that question," says the younger policeman, and Jamal fires back by asking them to answer a question about street food, a question they both get wrong. He then asks them who stole a bicycle last Thursday, and they have no idea, even though he knows the culprit.
We see Jamal on the game show, being posed the next question, about what the god Rama is typically depicted holding in his right hand. In a flashback, we see people washing their clothes, as Jamal and Salim play in the water. Jamal's mother looks over and sees a group of men charging towards the village. The Bombay riots are happening. As Jamal's mother yells at him to run, she gets hit in the head with a stick, dying from the blow, and Jamal and Salim make a run for it. The men throw torches at the small buildings and chaos breaks out. In the middle of their escape, Jamal and Salim see a manifestation of the god Rama, in the form of a young boy. They stare at him a moment, then continue to run.
A man is lit on fire and Jamal and Salim continue to flee through the town. They call to a young girl, telling her to come with them. Back in the present, Jamal says to the policemen, "I wake up every morning wishing I didn't know the answer to that question." We see the young Jamal staring at Rama, with the bow and arrow in his hand. On the gameshow, he gets the question right, winning 16,000 rupees. During the commercial break, the host advises Jamal to "take the money and run."
In flashback, Jamal and Salim stare at their village as it goes up in flames. A storm breaks out and as Jamal and Salim take shelter in a structure, Salim tells the girl they brought with them to go away, lest the security guard find them. "We don't even know the name of the third Musketeer," he says, lying down to sleep. Jamal looks at the girl, who is standing in the rain, then tries to sleep himself, but is haunted by images of his mother's death. He calls to the girl and invites her into the shelter. "Where's your mother? Your father?" he asks, but she has no one. She introduces herself as Latika.
On Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Jamal elects to keep going, with a question about which Indian poet wrote a famous song.
Analysis
From the beginning, the viewer is thrust into a vivid plot, as the shot shifts between a large studio, where the protagonist, Jamal Malik, is competing on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, and images of Jamal being slapped and tortured by a menacing-looking villain. The contrast between these two locales is striking. The bright lights of the television studio contrast with the bleak yellow lighting of the room where Jamal is facing his abuse. The expensive look of the studio is very distant from the dinginess of the small room.
Another element of the film that thrusts us into the narrative from the start is the fact that we know how it will end, but we do not know the steps that will lead there. The film starts by revealing the climactic moment—Jamal winning the big prize in the game show—and presenting a multiple-choice list of ways he could have won. In structuring the film this way, writer Simon Beaufoy and director Danny Boyle make it so that the viewer is watching the film in order to piece together the series of events that will lead to this ending.
Jamal's victory in the game show is subversive because of his class background, and he is framed as a kind of miracle for how well he does on the show. The miraculousness of his victory, however, makes him a threat to society, as a kid from the slums has never done so well on the show. Thus he becomes the victim of a torturous interrogation process, as the police try and figure out how someone of such a low class position could possibly do so well on a show that is built to only reward the well-educated and the upper class.
Soon enough the film goes into a flashback and Jamal's childhood in the slums overtakes the screen. Exciting music plays as we see a five-year-old Jamal running from the authorities with a pack of his friends, jumping off of roofs and through a busy village. This sequence, a barrage of Indian music and images of Indian slum life, takes over the screen and pulls the viewer into the story. A sense of adventure takes over the narrative, the excitement of childhood games and mischief, aligning the viewer with the protagonist Jamal.
Jamal is not an especially intellectual or well-educated young man, as is evidenced in the fact that he can barely answer a question about the national emblem of India. What he lacks in refined knowledge, however, he makes up for with a scrappiness and a savviness about how the world works. As he demonstrates with the two policemen, he knows more about the pricing of street food than they do, and his challenging them suggests that knowledge of all kinds—whether practical or intellectual—is valuable, and that he knows things as a "slumdog" that they could never know. Jamal retains a sense of pride even as the world attempts to knock him down for being lower class.
