I was eager to see this movie having heard it uniformly praised and described as a love story and a story about a poor Indian man who reaches the brink of fortune through unlikely circumstances. I was not at all prepared for the brutality of the first act of the movie, which includes torture, gruesome deaths, and child mutilation. Then I remembered it is a Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) movie and realized I should have known better. This is not offered as an indictment of the movie, but of the previous movie reviews I had read. This is a great movie (as is Trainspotting), and the brutal first act is a necessary part of the film.

This is a movie that makes you work for it, though not quite as hard, thankfully, as its protagonist, Jamal Malik (Dev Patel). Jamal has reached the last round of the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire as the movie starts. Since he grew up in the slums with virtually no formal education, reaching this level arouses suspicion. The movie tells the story of his life in flashbacks to show how he reached this point and knew the answers to the first 14 questions. It is a framing device for his story that is worlds apart from the setting of his life until that point. His story is brutal and compelling and also beautiful, as Boyle shows us India from the Taj Mahal to the slums of Mumbai and the villas and nightlife of the new Indian upper class.