Slumdog Millionaire (15)

The spirit of Dickens lights up Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, an antic, and romantic, fable about the joys and nightmares of childhood, about a boy's search for love, and about a teeming, terrifying city on the rise.

For Dickens that city was London; here it's Mumbai, now scarred, like London, by terrorist attacks yet wonderfully resilient and endlessly accommodating. I'm not sure it's a great movie, but it's certainly a great audience movie.

It begins in unlikely circumstances, and then spirals ever further into the fantastical and grotesque. Our hero, an 18-year-old boy named Jamal (Dev Patel), is being viciously interrogated by the police. Why? He's on the verge of winning the jackpot on India's version of the TV quiz Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and nobody believes a barely educated kid from the slums of Mumbai could ever have got this far without cheating. So he takes his sceptical inquisitor (Irrfan Khan) through each of the questions he has answered correctly, and in doing so, the film recounts the story of Jamal's life from rags to rupees – millions of them, possibly.

Artfully constructed by screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, it operates in a triangle: the televised duel between Jamal and the patronising quizmaster (Anil Kapoor), the police interview room, and the tragicomic episodes of a slumdog's life.

Intentionally or not, Boyle revisits episodes from his own films. When we see pint-size Jamal and his brother Salim being pursued by police through the colourful squalor of Mumbai we are instantly reminded of Renton and co fleeing the "polis" in Edinburgh. The streets are a world apart, but the lust for life is pretty much the same. Later, Jamal hears about the arrival in town of an Indian film star he longs to meet, but is trapped in a wooden latrine from which the only exit is down into the hideous slime below. Again, one thinks of Renton crouched over the bowl in the world's nastiest toilet and taking a dive head-first. Jamal, slathered in shit from head to foot, eventually gets his precious autograph – the star's name being the first answer he gets on his WWTBAM? ordeal. And so it goes.

Boyle's perspective seesaws, as did that of Dickens, between the savage and the sentimental. One moment he's casting an indulgent gaze upon Jamal and Salim as streetwise scamps, the next he's driving them into the unlovely embrace of a neighbourhood Fagin, who sets children to work as beggars and then mutilates the ones he thinks will elicit more pathos and money.

The film also regards place as a contrast between highs and lows, or between light and dark. The funniest passage of the movie has the two brothers lurking around the Taj Mahal and opportunistically offering themselves as guides to gullible tourists – they can tell stories quite as cheekily as anyone else. We're still enjoying this sunny interlude when the story plunges back into the fleshpots of Mumbai, where the lost love of Jamal's youth, a fellow orphan named Latika (Freida Pinto) is being primed for a life of prostitution.

As Jamal's story builds towards its crisis, the police inspector is moved to remark, "It is bizarrely plausible," which is a kinder way of saying, "I know I shouldn't be taken in by this stuff, but I am." One suspects it will be a popular response. There are episodes when the rub of fable on realism is much too abrasive, such as the moment Salim, having decided on the life of a hoodlum, then defies emotional logic by betraying the person dearest to him. (This is also how Jamal comes to learn that Samuel Colt invented the revolver.) When Jamal tracks down Latika to the gilded cage where she lives as a gangster's plaything, his entry into this high-security lair is so facile as to flout the limits even of "bizarrely plausible". And Boyle is as addicted to a chase scene as Richard Curtis is to the last-minute-dash-to-the -airport scene; it becomes devalued by overuse.

There are two aspects of the story, however, that Boyle nails accurately and compulsively. The first is the sense of Mumbai's transition from Third World penury to high-rise plutocracy, encapsulated in a fine scene where the good and the bad brother reunite, after several years, on the open floor of a skyscraper under construction. The picture of a city that has risen almost Icarus-like is reflected in the imagined moment Jamal experiences of hurling them both off this ledge and falling to their doom. The sense of a land in ferment is potently evoked, and recent events have confirmed the central role Mumbai has played in that metamorphosis.

Another subject, intimately related to this building boom, is the power of hard cash – dollars and rupees loom almost as characters in their own right. This, too, is a favourite leitmotif of Boyle's – most of his key films being about money, stolen or found or coveted or, as here, fetishised. In Slumdog Millionaire it's ironised as an irrelevance to Jamal, who's a lover, not a spender, but in that respect he's on his own: you only have to see people's faces as they watch Jamal on TV to know that money is a national obsession.

When Jamal pleads with Latika to abandon her repulsive patron and be with him, she asks, "And live on what?" "Love," he replies.

At that point, one feels that Keats's lines from Lamia might resonate for her: "Love, in a hut, with water and a crust/ Is – Love forgive us! – cinders, ashes, dust." For her, and for millions of others.