Sharpe's Opinion
Tuesday, 20th Jan, 2009
Slumdog and the power of coincidence
I watched Slumdog Millionaire1 over the weekend and was fascinated to read this from screenwriter John August, concerning the basic premise of the movie being summed up by “I knew the answer to this obscure question because this farfetched event happened to me once. And repeat.”
I would argue that Jamal’s knowing the right answers falls into my category of a Premise Coincidence, much the same way that in Die Hard, John McClane just happens to be in the building when the villains attack, or in the original Spider-Man, Peter Parker just happens to get bitten by the radioactive spider.
In each of these cases, the coincidence is the reason why the story is happening.
But I can see why Andre is bristling. In my original post, I single out luck and chance as being particularly flimsy pegs upon which to hang a story, and there are a couple of answers in Slumdog that seem arbitrary or tangential (the cricketeer comes to mind). However, the overall flashback structure sets a rule and sticks by it: every time we jump back, we’ll see how he got the answer.
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In fact, the biggest coincidence in Slumdog would have to be that the answers Jamal needs just happen to be found chronologically in his life story. That’s something you buy or you don’t. It didn’t bother me.
Funnily enough, I had this exact same conversation with my wife. We both thought it was a fantastic film, and it is, but the order of the questions, being chronological as compared to Jamal’s life story, bothered me – but it didn’t her. I suppose what bothered me about it was the missed opportunity to jump between different parts of Jamal’s life, which would have been both more clever and possibly more exciting. It didn’t irritate Ellie in the slightest.
- For anyone who hasn’t seen/heard about the film, it concerns an 18-year-old Indian orphan, Jamal Malik, who is on the last question of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’, with 20 million rupees at stake, and he is being forced to explain how he knows all of the answers. [↩]