Bombay and Son

Among the British novelists of the 19th century, Jane Austen has grown so popular over the past two decades that a bestselling novel was written about a book club dedicated to her. It is possible to engage literary-minded people in a discussion of Anthony Trollope, or George Eliot. These days, though, it matters little that Charles Dickens was the greatest prose stylist the English language has ever produced and wove as no one has before or since the disparate strands of classic storytelling–realism and fancy, the natural and the supernatural, psychological character study and broad comic caricature–into a glorious tapestry. We have lost the taste for him and his work. Why would this be?

I think it’s because there is not a moment’s ironic detachment in his fiction. His urgent, passionate, long-winded, crazily plotted, epic novels demand that we read them earnestly–that we not shy away from the sentimentality that drips from them, for example. Dickens famously cried as he wrote the death scene of the saintly child Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son. We are more inclined these days to share Oscar Wilde’s witty and mocking view of another Dickens character’s demise, that “one would have to have a heart of stone not to read of the death of Little Nell without laughing.”

Wilde’s ironic distance is a critical gift; it allows readers to resist cheap manipulation. But it is also limiting, because Dickens is not resorting to an authorial trick in these cases. If he had been, Dickens would not have wept over Paul Dombey. It is, rather, a bruising acknowledgment of the common tragedies of life, in which goodness and innocence are not enough to spare an angelic youth from the ravages of a harsh fate.

There have been more translations of Dickens to film than of any other writer save Shakespeare. That is fitting, since Dickens was the most cinematic of novelists, anticipating storytelling shortcuts that would be brought to fruition by the moving picture 75 years later. In A Christmas Carol, for example, he describes brilliantly an image of time passing that would come to be called the “lap dissolve”:

Here, a few pages later, Dickens invents the “slam cut”: “Although they had but that moment left the school behind them, they were now in the busy thoroughfares of a city, where shadowy passengers passed and repassed.”

In some ways, Dickens actually taught filmmakers how to tell a story visually, even though he did it in word pictures. Still, “Dickensian” is the last word I would have expected to apply to the work of the British filmmaker Danny Boyle, who made Slumdog Millionaire with the assistance of an Indian director named Loveleen Tandan. Boyle’s previous work, most notably a black comedy about Edinburgh junkies called Trainspotting, and the zombies-in-London horror flick 28 Days Later, is characterized by all manner of herky-jerky, up-to-the-minute visuals that usually have the opposite effect on a viewer from the cinematic techniques developed by Dickens. They are distancing. They never fail to remind the viewer he is sitting in a theater or at home in front of a television.

And yet something magical happens in Slumdog Millionaire. This is not only a heartfelt movie, it is a film bereft of irony, one that takes the predicaments and woes and victories of its characters with the utmost seriousness. It tells the story of an illiterate 18-year-old Muslim boy named Jamal working in an international call center in Bombay. He gets himself on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and is suspiciously successful. How is it that he, who knows nothing, can answer the questions posed to him? The movie is structured as an interrogation by a police detective who is certain Jamal is a fraud. As he explains the answer to each question, the story of his improbable life unfolds.

I don’t want to say more about Slumdog Millionaire. But the parallels to Dickens are everywhere in the screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, which was taken from a 2003 novel called Q&A by an Indian diplomat named Vikas Swarup that was an international bestseller. There are orphans and crooks, Fagins and Magwitches and Uriah Heeps, abandoned children, picaresque journeys, unlikely coincidences. Bombay teems with vivid and wretched life just as London does in Oliver Twist and Little Dorrit, two books about the miseries of children who must either overcome their straitened circumstances or fall into corruption, despair, and death.

Slumdog Millionaire makes the case that what we need now is a little more Dickens and a little less Wilde. It is one of the best movies I have ever seen.

John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.