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When British direct or Danny Boyle hits his mark, no matter the genre, hardly anyone moves a story better. That is surely the case with Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, the dazzling, if predictable, tale of an teenaged slum kid who by wild fluke ends up on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Not in a long while has a foreign film from anywhere gotten such praise—and it comes via Bollywood at that, and with a Brit director to boot. But does Slumdog boil down to little more than a cinematic hustle, pulled off by the exhilarating finesse of a "blithely glib entertainer" (as one critic put it)? Or might this be a story worth telling, made the more so by Boyle's stylistic pizzazz?
Such questions have dogged the still-young Boyle (all of 52) from the beginnings of what is now an estimable film career. From the very start, he has walked the line, bending and pushing tired genres, infusing the worn-and-weary with style, storytelling panache, and more than a little thematic bravado. Boyle's first film, Shallow Grave (1996), did a macabre comic turn on a bunch of nasty yuppie roommates who dispose of a new roomie's body (an overdose) to keep his unforeseen bag of cash. Style over substance, said critics. Enticing and bold but, like its title, shallow. Mordant, perhaps, but—given its gore and its crass, unpleasant characters—why bother?
So too with the instantly infamous Trainspotting (1996), an antic, scabrous romp on heroin addiction told, for once, from the inside out. The film is based on a popular Irvine Welsh novel (and then a stage play) about a bunch of Glasgow laddies whose favorite diversion, when not scrambling for dope, is watching trains. So much for Rob Roy and sweet Robbie Burns. Catching both the bliss and bane of "H," Trainspotting's ambidexterity rather awed viewers. Still, something about that premise—that we should suffer these blithe, amoral dimwits—annoys the moralist in us all. So savvy a critic as Janet Maslin in The New York Times, much irritated with herself, found the film "perversely irresistible" because of its rambunctious, "inexcusable merriment" in point of view (the film is guided by a voice-over narration by the main character). Nonetheless, she went away irked that we should be asked to care at all about these solipsistic sluggards, especially since any caring we do muster proceeds from Boyle's improperly "gleeful" storytelling. Or might this apology for doping really be "incendiary daring," as Rolling Stone reviewer Peter Travers celebrated?
Boyle can and does stumble—mightily. The verve that made Shallow Grave and Trainspotting worth watching, no matter how annoying, pretty much disappeared in Boyle's attempts to go mega-mainstream. First came The Beach (2000), a desert island romance cum Lord of the Flies starring Leonardo DiCaprio (his first role since Titanic, for a mere $20 million). Like DiCaprio as an actor, and the character he plays, the film aspires to both the pretty and portentous—and, as that odd pairing suggests, badly muddles whatever it's after.
The same vague weightiness characterizes a more recent big-budget venture, Sunshine (2007), an arduous sci-fi adventure in which planet Earth sends another crew—the first having disappeared—to re-ignite the dying Sun. Like The Beach, the film plays with notions of Light, though that proves ironic, for darkness triumphs—sort of, maybe, or does it? The sets are lovely, the visual scheme stunning, but, forsooth, in behalf of what? The film echoes masters of the visionary space tale—Tarkovsky, Kubrick, and even Spielberg—but never remotely coalesces into an intelligible thematic something. Maybe LA Times reviewer Kenneth Turan got it right in calling Boyle's work both "glib and facile," the most that can be expected from a filmmaker not up to a sensible look at anything very serious.
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