I've been listening to commentary about Slumdog Millionare with interest. I just spent 3 months of 2008 traveling to Mumbai slums on an almost daily basis. The footage of the Dharavi slum in the movie was amazing. The aerial shots and the reeling camera motion captured the energy and vibrance that I felt while walking in and out of Dharavi's alleys.
The author of this review on BBC calls Slumdog "kitschy, but not kitschy enough to stand up to Bollywood." In other words, the movie isn't realistic enough, because it stereotypically uses carefree children to gloss over the truth of slum life. Yet, it doesn't have the spirit of a true Bollywood film either.
I, on the other hand, liked the movie for its low-dose of Bollywood. For some reason, I have not yet developed a taste for Bollywood's dramatic flourishes. Slumdog had some of those, but wasn't packed with them. It was an avowedly unrealistic fairytale ending, complete with a musical number, but until the ending, the movie had none of the obvious drama--overt musical cues, over-acted facial expressions-- that are Bollywood signatures.
And I also liked its low-dose of realism. There is a palpable zest for life and plenty of productive activity in Dharavi. But everybody has a hard life. One of the hardest things that I saw is that so many people's children weren't healthy because of the lack of hygiene. It was an ongoing concern of most women. That doesn't mesh with the happy slum-is-my-playground scenes in the movie. Its also important to remember that Dharavi is a particularly vibrant slum, packed with small and large-scale industries. Other slums around Mumbai-- for example in the Govandi area-- give off a more truly depressed vibe. Nevertheless, I was struck by the basic optimism of many of the slum residents I met in Mumbai, and I think Slumdog Millionare captures that spirit. It gives you only a small part of the picture of living in a slum, but maybe a part that is not often acknowledged.