D. IT IS WRITTEN . . .

As I pretty much confessed in a post-Oscar post in February, I am not the world’s biggest movie buff, and although I attend an Oscar party with diehard moviegoers pretty much every year, I generally ante up for my daughters and let them fill in ballots in the winner-take-all voting pool. But last night I finally watched Slumdog Millionaire, and I wish now that I had been filling in a ballot myself in this past Oscar season. I thought the film was terrific from start to finish and would have slotted it in as winner not only in the “obvious” categories—Best Picture and Best Director—but also (why not pretty much run the table?) Best Original Song, Best Original Score, Film Editing, Sound Mixing, Cinematography and Writing (Adapted Screenplay): all the categories in which it got the Oscar nod. Hey, I could have picked up some decent walking-around money!

But part of what intrigued me immediately about the movie was not its overall engaging effect on so many levels (all of the above categories—and more) but its improbable ending, which brings together Jamil and Latika in a moment promising a happily-ever-after future. The movie itself concedes the improbability—even the implausibility—of this ending by showing during the closing credits an unlikely ensemble dance sequence, featuring Dev Patel (Jamil) and Freida Pinto (Latika), delightfully choreographed to the popular Hindi song “Jai Ho.” Part of the effect is to remind us of and/or to test the strength of our viewerly “willing suspension of disbelief” that necessarily kicks in during the film if we are to be engaged and entertained by it at all: it’s just a movie, the movie itself announces to us . . . at the end! Another dimension of the effect is to acknowledge that in its entirety—despite all the trappings of “realism”—the movie is really a “romance,” a fictionalizing of “reality” that (as Nathanial Hawthorne puts it) “sins unpardonably, so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart,” yet it has “fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.” At least that’s how I see it in a reflex response . . .

And I see it that way partly in light of my experience teaching Chet Raymo’s novel The Dork of Cork (and its film adaptation Frankie Starlight) this past semester. In the novel, the protagonist Frank Bois is the author of a memoir titled Nightstalk, of which his editor remarks: “I think the reader would have felt cheated by a happy ending.” That’s certainly how some of my students felt about the ending of Raymo’s book which frames Nightstalk. Some of them were quite unforgiving, despite Raymo’s embedding in the novel an analogue to the improbable relationship between Frank and the object of his childhood adoration, Emma. This analogue is in the form of a tale (ultimately from Chinese mythology) involving Vega the Weaving-girl and Altair the Herd-boy that Jack Kelly, Emma’s stargazing father, shares with young Frankie: “Once a year, on the seventh night of the seventh moon, at the height of summer, the lovers are allowed to meet when a bridge of birds briefly spans the stream of stars.” Unlike Simon Beaufoy, however, the screenwriter for Slumdog Millionaire, Raymo does not quite compose for himself the escape clause that Slumdog director Danny Boyle has appear on-screen in “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” fashion:

D. It is written

Raymo’s novel begins with the sentence “Begin with beauty.” But it is really a novel about beauty and brokenness—even “ugliness”—as Frank himself articulates: “Beautiful and sinister. Jack thought I didn’t understand. But I understood. I was eight or nine years old, but even then I understood how beauty and hurt get jumbled up together. Even then I had seen how long are the shadows that beauty casts.” So when we see Frank and Emma—the Herd-boy and the Weaving-girl—at the end of the novel (and of Frankie Starlight) we might wonder whether the happily-ever-after ending of their narrative is really as “beautiful” as that afforded Jamil and Latika. Hmmm . . . Late in The Dork of Cork, Frankie may be speaking for his author when he muses: “I like the sense of completion, of tying up loose ends . . .” Slumdog Millionaire happens to tie up its loose ends with a dance sequence and a flowing yellow scarf!