Who would have thought that I’d ever have cause to be thankful for Chris Tarrant?  Yet without him, would Slumdog Millionaire exist?  Who knows for sure?  All I know now is that Tarrant is a small price to pay for the existence of this superb film, which as you doubtless know charts the progress of a poor Mumbai lad in his teens on India’s version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?.

The tv show provides the screenplay with its structure: a simple and elegant choice that leads to excellent writing by Simon Beaufoy, on his finest form here since The Full Monty.  How much he’s assisted by the novel that the script adapts I don’t know, but on screen it works beautifully.  As you are probably aware, the quiz host — a splendidly oleaginous creation — asks the contestant a series of questions, each time doubling the prize money at stake, until it reaches the millions implied by the name of the show.  To provide a bit of extra assistance, the competitor is allowed to ask the audience for the answer, have half the wrong answers removed, or phone a friend.  And it’s the ‘phone a friend’ part which provides the story with its theme and helps to shape its structure.

Now, at this stage, you’ve got a perfectly workable story anyway.  A young man who on the surface wouldn’t seem to be that knowledgeable does really well in a tv quiz, and in the process gets to find out who his friends really are.  Good stuff.  What makes Slumdog Millionaire transcend that basic premise is its setting.  Putting the action into the whirligig chaos of modern Mumbai is a great example of something that cinema does beautfiully: introduce us to another world.  And here, it’s that of India’s street kids, three of whom we meet at an early age and who we trace up to the present of the film when, in their teens, the two boys and girl have drifted apart.

Mumbai is very much part of the character of the film, and we imbibe a sense of what life is like there for those without money.  We’re also introduced to those who do have it, in the form of a villainous tycoon who takes one of the lads under his wing and makes the girl his mistress.  He’s a brute, and a believable one, a kind of Hindi Ray Winstone figure.

Dev Patel, best known at this point for Skins, is excellent as Jamal Malik.  There’s something about him that engages audience sympathies above and beyond the trials and tribulations the script puts him through.  Mind you, when you see the unlpeasantness he experiences at the hands of the police, who torture him thinking that the chai wallah is surely cheating, you can’t help but reach out to him.  And it’s this interrogation which is the other structural element of the film: as he’s questioned, he recalls the variously grim, fantastic, and comedic life events that have supplied him with the knowledge that’s so useful to him in the quiz.

It all seems effortless.  Most of the time I’d be very wary of a script employing so many flashbacks, but here they’re not at all irksome or tricksy, instead an inevitable consequence of the nature of the story.  Oh, and on a technical note, the flashbacks are always primarily emotionally-driven, their expositional qualities less obvious because of that.  It’d be nice if more writers and directors bore that in mind, and I’m suffering a flashback to Guy Ritchie’s oeuvre even as I type this.

Anyway, Slumdog Millionaire is masterful stuff.   It’s a gorgeous, life-affirming movie that proves feelgood doesn’t have to mean braindead.  The performances are strong, the writing is sublime, it looks wonderful, and there’s a lively soundtrack too.  Film of the year already?  Well, that remains to be seen, what with it only being January — but director Danny Boyle has set the bar high with this wonderful movie, easily his finest to date.