Danny Boyle seems an unlikely choice to direct Slumdog Millionaire, yet an inspired one. The film is not only structurally ingenious and visually stimulating, but it contains an ambivalent feel-good factor that is the key driver of the plot. From start to finish, this is a rollercoaster that is both fun and intelligent.

The London-born debutant, Dev Patel, has only played in one television series, Skins (2007-2008). As far as cinema is concerned, he is as much a non-entity as Jamal Malik, the illiterate orphan teenager from Mumbai who gets to the final question in the Hindi version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. This is how we enter his life. Unfortunately for him, the last question is delayed into a second day, giving the producers and the police the chance to arrest him for cheating. Lawyers, teachers, journalists, et al – they all fail to win, so the question of how a poor uneducated young lad from the slums of Mumbai manages to get there is a pertinent one.

The arrest is key to the film’s structure. After a couple of failed attempts at menial torture, and a proper beating in the prison, Jamal still insists that he ‘knew the answers’. Well, the only way to prove it is to replay the entire show and have him explain how exactly did he know them. This is how Jamal’s life story unfolds. Starting from the carefree childhood days in the biggest slum in the world and the death of his mother during an anti-Muslim raid, to the travails two orphaned young boys have to endure, and culminating in the discovery of love for an old friend – the road we’re taken on is an exciting travelogue through India’s past and present.

Danny Boyle’s incarnation of the Mumbai slums is the main startling achievement of the film. Here we are not just spectators, for the director forces us to penetrate the depths of a community that is vibrant, full of colours and madness. We really feel that we’re surrounded by millions and millions of nameless familiar faces, as if we’ve lived in that place for a lifetime. The young Jamal (the outstanding Ayush Mahesh Khedekar) gives us a taste of the city. Boyle explores Mumbai not with the eye of a documentarist, but with Jamal’s memory. The cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle breathes through colours remembered by the young boy. His childhood is magical, harsh, yet still charming, and so the rich palette sits at odds with the meaningless (bright) dull reality of the television cameras he has been subject to.

The childhood segment is by the far the longest and the most memorable of the entire film. Slumdog Millionaire implies that this is when true education happens. If we step back from the euphoria created by Simon Beaufoy’s script (adapted from Vikas Swarup’s Q & A), we can see clearly that we learn most about the key protagonists’ character construction in the early part of the film. Jamal is always the quiet one, the generous one, the caring one. His brother, Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail) is almost the opposite: calculated, enterprising, and cruel. And then there is Latika (Rubiana Ali), the mischievous orphan who joins their brotherhood of the three musketeers. The moment we meet her, Latika is alone, standing on a street in the middle of a torrential rain, looking hopefully at the shelter Salim and Jamal have created for themselves. She endures the cold because that is her life, absent of real significance.

The older Latika (Freida Pinto) may at first appear to be a bit of a caricature, a hopeless girl who has learned that in order to be safe she needs to rely on the men around her. What has Jamal seen in this girl, that he is ready to risk everything in life just to have the chance to meet her again? Maybe there isn’t actually that much to her apart from a good-looking face, and given his background, many would argue that his standards may not be that high anyway. However, her first encounter as a child with Jamal, tells a different story. The boy saw stoicism, the promise of survival no-matter-what, but he also saw her fragility. It is precisely this weakness that draws them together. They both require protection in their solitary existence, yet it needs not to be of a dominant kind, but rather of a soothing one. By undermining their strength, each of them will see the other as the healer, their better part.

Boyle’s film is not actually about the quiz show. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? provides the setting for us to explore a character, to understand his thoughts and motivations. We are then presented with the true leitmotif. Slumdog Millionaire is ultimately about love, for a place, for a country, for a history, for a dear person, but mainly it is about the love of life. This is the reason why the film feels so good.

Looking then from this perspective, it is impossible to miss the famous ‘Choose Life’ tagline of Trainspotting (1996). Boyle seems to be retelling the same ‘discovery of life’ fairytale from a different angle. If Trainspotting was about self-inflicted pain, the Slumdog is about pain derived from external factors. The argument is weak though, because the drugs Ewan McGregor’s character is taking are in themselves an external harm that are being inflicted upon one through choice. Arguably then, Jamal’s obsessive love for Latika can be viewed as a choice towards an addiction. All the tribulations that follow are thus linked to that original choice.

So, is Danny Boyle a surprising choice for filming a love story, breathing with calm, humour and beauty, that ends in a Bollywood style dance-number? No. What we see is a director concerned with the same need to explore the human ability to posses control over their own life. Will Jamal live with Latika happily ever after? It’s unlikely, but Boyle offers them hope, and through that he offers us a drum of courage to face the next day.