The Book Tower

Next to The Weakest Link, Who Wants to be a Millionaire is probably the most recognisable of game shows, although I’d never have put money on using the familiarity of either of them for the basis of a film. Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire cleverly weaves a story into the Who Wants to be a Millionaire format and shifts the setting to India. Here a teenager from the slums of Mumbai takes part in the game show, proceeds to the highest level of the contest and is arrested under suspicion of cheating. During interrogation we learn how he knew all of the answers, which unfolds as the result of a combination of personal tragedy and sheer luck.

Slumdog Millionaire has received some criticism for an unrealistic depiction of Indian poverty, and the film certainly contains many of Danny Boyle’s mannerisms. He’s a brilliant visual director but is sometimes lazy with characterisation, and his adrenalin fuelled style of direction can often be tiring. He isn’t a naturalistic film maker, and if his portrait of India is wrong, I wouldn’t think it was any more wrong than the world of Edinburgh drug addicts he presented in Trainspotting. For me, his most convincing film to date is 28 Days Later, a zombie movie.

Nevertheless, Danny Boyle is a director who knows how to engage his audience, possibly more than any other to emerge from the British Isles in the last twenty years. Slumdog Millionaire is being hailed as the feelgood movie of the decade, an oft used tagline that does for once ring true. And Boyle manages to add a little more substance to his feelgood factor, this film is at times uncomfortable and gruesome. Realistic or not, it does show a horrible world from which the audience desperately want its hero to escape from. And this is what makes good cinema.

It’s difficult to give away any more a plot than I have already without spoiling the film. In custody, Jamal (Dev Patel) is roughed up by the police but does not confess himself to be a cheat. Having calmed down a little, the sweaty cops play a video of the Millionaire show, setting up the flow of the film which switches between the settings of interrogation room, last night’s quiz show and Jamal’s life. Jamal, his brother Salim and their friend Latika are each played by three different actors as they whizz through childhood to early adulthood. It’s a device that works well visually, although apart from Patel as Jamil I found there was little time to really get to grips with any of them beyond broad sketches. Indeed, the best actor in the film is Anil Kapoor as the smarmy game show host Prem Kumar, a nasty glint in his eye behind the affable exterior, much more Anne Robinson that Chris Tarrant.

Boyle plays with the Millionaire format very well, the ask the audience and the 50/50 choices played as skilfully as they should be in the game itself; we await the phone a friend segment hoping that it will form a memorable part of the climax to the story – Doyle doesn’t disappoint. Whilst reaction to the fairytale ending may be divided (depending on your definition of feelgood) I found the stories behind the Q and As of the game show clever and absorbing, and the scene in the washroom with Jamal and Kumar so simply effective it’s become one of my favourite scenes in recent cinema. Although not perhaps the ten out of ten I’d been led to believe, Slumdog Millionaire is certainly a good nine. And that’s my final answer.

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I had high hopes for Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. But whilst much of the book is very well written, I found the overall reading experience dull. For a relatively short novel, I struggled at times and was pleased to get it over with. I found the novel’s narrator, Hans van den Broek, unlikeable and consequently cared little for him. His wife, Rachel, was too sketchy, equally unlikeable. The third main character, Chuck, was equally sketchy, equally unlikeable. This is an incredibly, and annoyingly, overrated and pretentious novel.

I guess you’ve guessed that I didn’t like it very much, so I’d like to move on to The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry. This novel was nominated for last year’s Booker prize. It’s a very well written book, and the sort of book that at times suggests that it is going to turn into something rather special indeed.

The Secret Scripture is set in an institution in Ireland, the sort of place that was once called an asylum, and this way of thinking is at the heart of the novel. Long term inmate Roseanne, nearing one hundred years of age, looks back on her life in what has become a jumbled view of personal history. By her own admission, memory plays tricks and is deceitful, or can she not face the pain of the past? Why is she incarcerated and what, however misjudged, is the reason for it? Dr Grene, an apparently benign psychiatrist, attempts to piece her life together of the eve of the hospital’s closure. But are his motives really so kindly?

As I’ve said, at times I thought this novel was on the brink of brilliance. I liked the way that it played with memory and the reader’s trust in the narrator. The point of view switches betweeen that of Roseanne and Dr Grene, from her own take on events to Grene’s attempt at research into the cloudy past. For a moment I thought that The Secret Scripture was going to rival and possibly surpass Atonement in its examination of memory and how foolish choices can so affect the future with terrible consequences. And how it isn’t all as it seems, not all as it really happens.

But The Secret Scripture has a twist. And it’s a terrible twist, but alas not in the satisfactory sense. It’s a twist I saw coming but one I hoped I had wrong. It’s not a twist I’ll share to spoil the book, although it’s one that ultimately does ruin the novel. Another damn shame.

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Many contemporary directors would probably turn down the offer to make a short film intended to promote Eurostar. Luckily Shane Meadows continues to shine in his own league, and he turns this rather odd concept into another of his string of original and charming films. Working on the Eurostar project, Meadows realised he had a proper feature in the making, and Somers Town is the result. It’s a beautifully shot black and white movie set in the Kings Cross area of London, featuring the usual mix of Meadows humour and poignancy.

In the Shane Meadows canon, Somers Town sits somewhere between A Room for Romeo Brass and his early feature Smalltime. He proves again that he directs youngsters brilliantly and there’s also the bleak observation of people wasting their days away with hopeless, harmless petty crime. This film will draw comparisons with his most celebrated work This is England because it again stars Thomas Turgoose in the lead and features Perry Benson in a supporting role. Both are excellent but play characters far removed from the darker and more dangerous predecessor. Somers Town is funny and light, often at odds with the grim sights of London it depicts.

Turgoose plays Tommo, a lad from the Midlands who finds himself instantly homeless in London. He befriends Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a Polish teenager holed up in a flat all day as his father works on a building site. The two of them while away their days attempting to court a young waitress, earning petty cash from an eccentric neighbour (Benson) and desperately trying to find Tommo a new set of clothes. Marek also hides his friend in the flat while his father is out at work, and although he inevitibly finds him the outburst thankfully doesn’t spill into usual Meadows territory. As I’ve said, this film is fairly lightweight and easily the most accessible of Meadows’ films.

Fans of the director, like me, will love this. Anyone new to him may leave the experience baffled, finding him no more than a grittier Mike Leigh. I loved the film for its simplicity in exploring innocence, early friendship and first love, and there’s a fabulous soundtrack. And mostly I liked it because Shane Meadows just appears to go on following his own instinct, delivering film after memorable film.

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