There are a number of fair critiques one could level against Slumdog Millionaire, but Salman Rushdie chooses to attack its unrealistic plot?
Lecture at Emory, 2009, as reported by the Guardian:
“The movie piles impossibility on impossibility,” he said in a lecture at Emory University in Atlanta, raising questions over how the characters end up at the Taj Mahal, 1,000 miles from where they were in the previous scene, and how they manage to get their hands on a gun in India.
“Imaginary Homelands,” 1982:
The broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed. Let me again try and explain this from my own experience. Before beginning Midnight’s Children, I spent many months trying simply to recall as much of the Bombay of the 1950s and 1960s as I could; and not only Bombay—Kashmir, too, and Delhi and Aligarh, which, in my book, I’ve moved to Agra to heighten a certain joke about the Taj Mahal.
If the broken mirror offers a valuable reflection of the world for Rushdie, why not for Boyle?
The more interesting question here, though, is how Boyle’s depiction of the Mumbai slums differ from Rushdie’s in, say, The Moor’s Last Sigh.
