The script, formerly titled Bagman, has been retitled Casino Jack, perhaps in candor or maybe hope, as the structure echoes Martin Scorsese’s masterwork Casino.  That film’s narrative structure, the film noir plot which begins near the end, with voice over by the protagonist in an ambiguous time warp, then rewinds to skip around in the plot back to the earlier scene, is replicated in Casino Jack.  Such imitation is revealing, as Scorsese’s Casino gives us nothing less than the essence of an era, the golden age of Las Vegas, before it is destroyed by the characters we follow, Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein, Nicky Santoro, Ginger, and the old-time mob, through failures of limits, trust, growth, and awareness, to be overtaken by corporate ownership.  

—–

Casino Jack harbors similar aspirations, the essence of an era, in this case ostensibly the Bush II era.  But it is the “Republican Revolution” that Casino Jack targets, and after beginning with the Washington Post exposure and bust of the fictional “Jack Abramoff” and the murder of “Gus Boulis,” we discover the 21 year old Jack rooted in 1980, a college Republican riding in a campaign limo with “Ronald Reagan” himself, who counsels Jack: never surrender; there are no constraints on the human mind; no walls around the human spirit; no barriers to our progress except those we erect ourselves; the family is everything; all great changes in America begins around the dinner table.  This is Casino Jack’s foundational Reaganite wisdom, though Reagan will return and give Jack a cryptic warning, too late, about idealism. 

This Jack is an agent of smashmouth capitalism. Early on we see him busted in his Gulfstream wearing a $1000 Armani suit.  He is the son of a “Rat Pack” former Diners Club president now retired to Palm Springs, raised in Beverly Hills, and has become a superstar Washington lobbyist representing Indian tribes’ gambling interests.  Jack also invests, through homeboy “Adam Kidan” (think Joe Pesci’s Nicky Santoro) in Florida offshore gambling boats and owns a fancy restaurant in DC.  He represents the Northern Mariana Islands, where his Congressman friend vacations, entertained by a “nubile young Asian woman,”  and which manufactures “in the rag trade” under “Made in USA” labels, not subject to US labor law.  It is an increasingly murky, tragic saga of greedy Republican financial chicanery.  When things unravel, a partner at Jack’s firm compares the whole debacle to Enron.    

Besides the economics, there is also a cultural aspect to Casino Jack’s Republican Revolution. Cornered by the Washington Post and various investigations, Jack declares that he’s being attacked by the worst people in our culture. Jack’s wife Pam is a pale, long suffering, cheerful blonde soccer mom who drinks too much, while Jack puffs Cuban cigars.  When son Alex’s band teacher turns out to be gay, Jack declares that his kids will be “normal” and fearing “the gays” will try to convert his kids he goes on to found his own private school, Eshkol Academy, dedicated to conservative Jewish learning. 

The role of fundamentalist religion in Casino Jack’s version of the Republican Revolution is enormous.  When he is arrested, the omniscient voice-over Jack tells us that he believes God has a plan for him, a God who has been with him from the very beginning. Cut to: Ronald Reagan. Afterwards Jack’s voice informs us that like Moses looking for a light in the darkness he found his in a beautiful shining city on a hill.

In this formulation, Jack and his allies are a band of true believers and Reagan their deity.  These allies, including “Tom Delay,” “Grover Norquist,” and “Ralph Reed” assemble as a Capital Hill Bible Study Group, where Jack testifies that Republican beliefs share the same moral beliefs as God and God wants people to be liquid. 

This blurring of God and Reagan does not prevent Jack from manipulating the flock.  At Scotland’s St. Andrew’s golf course, Jack conspires with the Chief of the Saginaw Chippewas against the nearby Jena tribe opening a casino.  Jack suggests they mobilize Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed to launch a crusade opposing gambling. Throughout this script we get such combinations of claims of righteousness with duplicitous, venal, even evil acts.     

That Jack is an orthodox Jew provides a certain cover for the script’s anti-religious theme, one that eventually explodes in a disgusting scene, a snark’s attempt at The Merchant of Venice, full of smugness and hate.  Eventually there is a point at which such adolescent pique, with it anti-capitalist, anti-Judeo-Christian, Manichean reflexes becomes indistinguishable from a jihadist world view. 

Finally, the paramount mission of exposing Reaganite corruption becomes this script’s downfall.  We meet the fictional Reagan, Delay, Reed, Norquist, Bob Ney, and Karl Rove, as they pass through in a one-dimensional kabuki of the left’s villains.  This leaves the script, unlike Casino, with no dramatic structure, no conflict, just the study of bad characters going down.  In this way it resembles Oliver Stone’s revisionist histories, more broadside than dimensional drama. 

Judged in these terms, it’s just more vulgar Marxist history from Hollywood, stigmatizing opposition politics that has already been criminalized.  It is arguable that the real Jack Abramoff was coerced into guilty pleas, that he did not commit wire fraud, that he facilitated the Indian tribes’ enormous financial successes, and that his “honest services fraud” is an especially bad joke these days.

During the 2008 campaign Barack Obama promised “Lobbyists won’t find a job in my White House.”  Last March Isi Siddiqui became the 50th lobbyist appointed to a policy-making job by Obama, four of which were among recess appointments, without confirmation votes.  Service Employees International Union president Andy Stern, not officially registered as a lobbyist, among Big Labor donors of $400 million to Obama’s campaign, visited the White House 36 times in 2009, SEIU Treasurer Anna Burger 39 times.  Democrat lobbying firm The Raben Group, including an all-star roster of former staffers for Democrat and liberal causes, trumpeted their role in ObamaCare as a “Success,” including: $1.5 billion home visitation for client Nurse Family Partnership; $6.3 billion in Medicaid for US territories, including $1 billion for Puerto Rican Latinos United for Healthcare, created by Raben; easing approval for biotech drugs for Amgen; training and development on behalf of Direct Care Alliance; and requirement of insurance information on resources for Compassion & Choices. 

While the Hollywood left wanks over its antique cartoon models of corruption, Obama and the progressives have backed up the truck and are looting the public treasury like Third World kleptocrats.

Note: It’s important to note, the script is not the film (which hits theatres Dec. 12th), but simply most of the plot, about half of character, and very little of the setting and filmic style.  It’s a real caution, especially in a film featuring as strong an acting talent as Kevin Spacey.

The American film industry was in bad shape in the 60’s, crippled by the breakup of the studios, the arrival of TV, and the fragmentation of the audience.  It was rescued by a new generation of filmmakers we call the Hollywood Renaissance, mostly graduates of film schools who brought along new generational attitudes and aesthetics.  Their aesthetics were much influenced by what they had watched in film school: lots of European films, especially the French New Wave, notably “Breathless,” steeped in the aesthetics of modernism (fragmentation, formalism, difficulty, self-reference, distancing, the license of authorship).  The breakout films of the Hollywood Renaissance (“Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Graduate,” “2001,” “The Wild Bunch,” etc.) were full of modernist aesthetics. “Raging Bull” is their fruition.        

In taking the life of 1940’s middleweight champ Jake LaMotta as its material, “Raging Bull” gained access to multiple layers of self-referencing history; the entire post-WWII era, its films, even personal histories.  As film history, it invokes the prizefight film, a sub-genre of film noir (“Golden Boy,” “Body and Soul,” “Champion,” “The Harder They Fall”) as melodramas of struggle and betrayal, but much more seriously, the gangster genre itself, which through Coppola’s landmark “The Godfather” had become the dominant genre mythology of the 70’s.  Scorsese counters Coppola’s family epic cum pagan opera with a world of busted families and predatory crooks, through which the solitary Jake must pass in his lonely spiritual quest, a thrilling dispute that Coppola would take up in “The Godfather Part III.”  This self-referencing history oscillates, from the deep background of the film medium itself, which signals the arrivals of color film and TV, to a place where Jake stands in for the solitary film artist in the independent production era, to a foreground nod to Scorsese’s family photos, his father as gangster, even himself in the last scene. 

Formally, “Raging Bull” fully accepts the modernist challenge of fighting the war against convention at the front lines.  The use of black and white, hand-held camera, and slow-motion modulate the film’s distancing effects; the Expressionist design and low-key lighting are master classes; the editing brilliant in its breathtaking liberties; and of course the sound.  The great formal contribution of the Hollywood Renaissance was the total reinvention of motion picture sound, technologically and aesthetically, from “American Graffiti” and “The Conversation” on.  “Raging Bull” continues this adventure, editing sound against image, changing speeds of each independently, performing montage purely in audio, and even pursuing the elusive Expressionist soundtrack. 

As if these formal adventures are not enough, “Raging Bull” gives us one of the great meditations on film acting, which after WWII means method acting.  More than the sixty pounds De Niro would put on during production, every single instant of the film is freighted with the testing of method acting for its promised sense of authenticity, as against classical discipline (“though I’m no Olivier…”), even against it’s greatest performances (Brando’s “I could have been a contender” speech). 

The issue of difficulty is tricky.  Boxing, among the earliest of motion pictures subjects, is easy.  It comes right to you in a violent, vulgar way, like popular entertainment.  Opera, from another time in another language, can be difficult, requiring a lot of work by the audience, like high art.  “Raging Bull” begins with both, Jake shadow boxing in slow motion in a dream ring to the Intermezzo of Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana,” now high art but in its day an anti-romantic tale of brutal peasant passion, much like “Raging Bull.”  It’s a shifting frame, inviting us to consider both the fighter and the filmmaker as artists one instant and buffoons the next.  The film continually shifts this frame of violence and beauty, of entertainment and art.  The fights themselves will serve as both Jake’s and Scorsese’s arias, deeply felt songs of pure lyrical passion, but in the end Scorsese is a stagehand and Jake a clown, declaring, “That’s entertainment.” 

If opera is difficult, how about Catholicism?  Scorsese said early on that only two things were important to him, film and religion.  This is a film that insists you take its religious dimension and Jake’s spiritual voyage seriously.  For Scorsese, it is less the ritual, ceremonial Catholicism of Coppola’s films, but more the Jesuit sense of a lonely and painful spiritual journey.  It is appropriate that boxing is essentially solitary.  Jake passes through crystalline moments transgression, guilt, penance, and, perhaps, absolution.  Perhaps Jake achieves some grace at the end. 

After “Raging Bull” it becomes more and more difficult to bridge the gap between entertainment and art, and motion pictures increasingly veer towards either the surefire pleasures of comic books or the smug elitist pleasures of post-modernism. 

Amazingly “Raging Bull” manages to hold all its aspects and purposes together.  Somehow we know that it is sincere, that it does not speak to us falsely, through silliness or irony.  It’s the real deal.

Brooks is a superstar pundit.  A featured journalist at The Weekly Standard, in 2000 Brooks was author of “Bobos in Paradise,” a smart look at “bourgeois bohemians,” the educated, “counterculture” crowd that had become America’s new blue state power elite.  Brooks went on to occupy the house conservative Op Ed position at the liberal mainstay New York Times and the equivalent chair on PBS NewsHour’s version of crossfire, with ever-apologetic Brooks pitted against the always garrulous lefty Mark Shields.  These two roles established Brooks as the left’s favorite conservative, a position he solidified as one of the Obamacons, prominent conservatives who supported Obama, believing him to be a moderate centrist, or in Brooks’ case, even a closet Burkean conservative. 

Last week Brooks went with his 15-year-old daughter to see a Springsteen concert in Baltimore and witnessed her joyous astonishment.  Her arrival at utter abandon echoed the exhilaration, the emotional learning, Springsteen had long ago imparted to Brooks, the depiction of a world of “teenage couples out on a desperate lark, workers struggling as the mills close down, and drifters on the wrong side of the law,” tales told with a jolt for “10,000 people in a state of utter abandon.”   

Brooks fondly describes the artistry and stories of Springsteen’s universe, “a distinct map of reality” seen on an epic and anthemic scale, in which “losers” always retain dignity and their choices have immense moral consequences, with emotions like stoicism, seen through veils of exaltation and nostalgia.  

Brooks also contemplates the artist, Springsteen himself, elusive, but for Brooks revealed by the “embarrassed half-giggle he falls into when talking about himself,” which Brooks reads as a humble de-emphasis of his own individual contributions in favor of the various musical traditions he presents. 

Brooks’ view is both charmingly personal and astonishingly superficial. It should occur to Brooks that the epic, anthemic performance he celebrates, through veils of exaltation and nostalgia, is a brilliantly constructed and much polished reach toward the mythological.  The desperate teenagers, laid-off mill workers, lawbreaking drifters are less the real folks of Springsteen’s life or American history than the figures of 60’s counterculture mythology, all of whom stand in, like Bonnie and Clyde, for alienated middle class adolescents searching for an identity.  

In an affectionate but clear-eyed analysis of the Springsteen show, Slate’s Stephen Metcalf has described this map of reality as “Faux Americana,” “a middle class fantasy of white, working class authenticity,” which Metcalf wisely attributes to Jon Landau, Springsteen’s producer, manager, and “full-service Svengali.” Landau, graduate of Brandeis and veteran of the 60’s Boston political scene, ‘discovered’ Springsteen, famously declaring, “I have seen rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen,” echoing left-wing journalist Lincoln Steffens 1921 remark after visiting the Soviet Union, “I have seen the future, and it works.”  Springsteen’s own politics have been decidedly left-wing: “I was politicized by the 60’s,” he has observed, and has supported John Kerry, anti-nuke, pro-Sandinista, Amnesty International, and MoveOn campaigns.   

The ‘Bruce’ David Brooks celebrates is not just the self-effacing voice of our musical traditions.  After all, in the rock pantheon he is ‘the Boss.’ Rather, the concerts are fully dramatized and choreographed presentations of Springsteen as the everyman oracle of this mythology, bourn on Wagnerian walls of sound.  Metcalf observes, the persona is constructed, “a majestic American simpleton with a generic heartland twang,” a much refined invention, all “po-faced mythic resonance that now accompanies Bruce’s every move.” 

The fanciful working class authenticity is key, the basis of the Boss’ claim on what Brooks sees as immense moral authority.  Brooks quotes Landau, that there is “not a lot of irony” in Bruce’s work, which, if you have any critical distance from the fabricated character, attendant mythology, and anthemic music, is dead wrong, Otherwise, you are Metcalf’s “rock and roll naïf,” and Landau is a circus huckster.  

Springsteen is not alone in constructing a persona, with its own mythology, claiming an imagined authenticity.  Many among the cast of characters of the 60’s counterculture, including rock stars, were in fact middle class kids who remade their own histories and identities, which is okay so long as 40 years after Woodstock and Altamont you mention to your impressionable 15-year old kid, this is show business, these are not the real gods, this is not your real history. 

But this is not likely among the blue-state elites.  Rather, it is likely that Brooks’ daughter will, at an elite university, be taught a map of reality rather close to the Boss’ faux Americana.  This is only too cruel, as it is also likely that today’s 15-year-olds will be asked to be stoical, to pay for all the mischief, all the self-serving boomer schemes, financial and otherwise.

Class warfare rests on the assumption, usually well disguised and used very selectively, that capitalist profits are a rip-off, a heist, “unearned.” In his recent health-care pitch, President Obama declared insurance companies are “making record profits,” a questionable claim but presumably identifying both the evil enemy and the room for government to save money, if you buy that the government can deliver something as good for the same cost.  

This selective economic demonization serves two purposes. First, it attempts to write current history.  During the debates, candidate Obama asserted that the economic crisis was the result of the lack of regulation, presumably of Wall Street speculators gone wild. It was a time of frightening mystery, with the pipes of the financial system seemingly clogged. It was evident that exotic financial instruments, like bundled mortgages and credit default swaps, were the clogs. But the meal was the housing bubble, caused mostly by government policies. It was a policy, not a regulatory, crisis. Read Thomas Sowell. 

Second, demonizing Wall Street gins up class warfare, an even more reliable tool of progressive demagoguery than those tricky diversity cards. If diversity pieties are likely winners so long as we are different, then class war is surefire so long as those schmucks up there take big scores while we inevitably stew in our envy. 

If there is any group that should recognize this hustle, it’s the entertainment community, which lives in a marketplace as clearly defined as Wall Street. Big stars take down big scores; last year Harrison Ford got $65 million, Adam Sandler $55 million, Will Smith about $50 million, and Eddie Murphy about $40 million.  The reason: being a true star involves a mystical chemistry between player, camera, and audience, and it’s very scarce in this risky business. Since the demise of the classical, vertically integrated studio, only a star and/or a sequel can secure ticket sales on an opening weekend. 

Same story in TV: Oprah made a colossal $225 million, her pal Dr. Phil took home $45 million, Letterman $40 million. To this list, add star athletes (they’re also entertainers): Tiger Woods banked $110 million, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, and Finnish Formula One racer Kimi Raik $45 million, Manny Pacquiao $30 million. Maybe Barnie Frank could deem some of Harrison Ford’s pay as unearned or try to take Pac-Man’s money back for taking excessive risk. 

Perhaps you think the Wall Streeters deserve more regulation because the government had to bail them out, though some have repaid and the House bill would regulate even non-borrowers. But as John Nolte has pointed out, Hollywood itself, like the film industry worldwide, has long been up to its neck in public subsidies (tax breaks, film offices, use of public spaces), as have TV and professional sports (airwaves, stadiums, transportation, etc.).    

A sidelight to all this: most movie and TV stars, super-jocks, and hedge fund managers supported Obama, suggesting that cultural identification trumps economic interest.     

Whatever stars and moguls say or do in public, privately they understand the way capitalism works. It’s centripetal, a car wreck that throws off money and progress and wreckage unequally, in many directions (Schumpeter’s “creative destruction“). But even if you’re not a star, you want to be in on the deal. A carpenter or seamstress or driver in the industry, especially attached to a successful crew, makes more than their counterpart in the regular economy, not to mention sharing the freedom and spiritual rewards of the creative life. This is what John Kennedy meant when he said a rising tide lifts all ships. 

Demonizing the market economy in the interest of government regulation to equalize things can only screw things up for everybody.

Recently the film’s British director Danny Boyle, serving as jury president of the 12th Shanghai Film Festival, confided during a panel discussion that on “Slumdog” he had shed the patronizing, “imperialist” mentality, relying heavily on a local Indian crew. Boyle also observed that while it was “regrettable” that Beijing imposed censorship restrictions on its filmmakers, he’d nonetheless love to work in China, as it would be a “challenge learning Mandarin.” Boyle neglected to mention that on “Slumdog” he’d skipped the challenge of learning Hindi, necessitating an Indian co-director, and also skipped the patronizing practice of paying Western wages, and the low pay for local child actors would fuel most of the subsequent controversies.

After its national US release in January 2009, “Slumdog” received a positive critical reception in the West, with a 94% rating by Rotten Tomatoes, though some critics raised what would become ongoing issues, with “The Guardian’s” Peter Bradshaw regarding it as “an outsider’s view” and “a product placement” for the very quiz show owned by Celador, the film’s producer. But on its release in India, including in a dubbed Hindi version of this mostly (2/3) English language film, “Slumdog” did only moderate box office, especially the English version, which one trade analyst found “not ideally suited for Indian sentiment.” Indian critics mostly bought the film’s energetic ride, while others puzzled over the mix of languages and the key issue of authenticity, questioning whether the film was “a white man’s imagined India,” a superficial “poverty porn.” Even novelist Salman Rushdie was unhappy, objecting to the film’s slick yet improbable pop version of “magical realism.”

Then the issue of pay for the child actors began to make news, with the Times of India claiming Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, who played Salim as a child, was paid £700 and Rubina Ali, who played Latika, £500, with both still living in makeshift shacks in the slums of Bandra, a suburb of Mumbai. Distributor Fox Searchlight replied that for their month of work the kids were paid three times the average annual adult Bandran salary. Boyle and producer Christian Colson added that they had “paid painstaking and considered attention to how Azhar and Rubina’s involvement in the film could be of lasting benefit to them over and above the payment they received for their work.” This attention included trust funds to cover education, transportation, and expenses for the next eight years. Boyle declined to reveal the amounts of these trust funds, as this could make them “vulnerable and a target,” but according to the India Times Azhar got £17,500 in trust until age 18. His father, Mohammed Ismail, responded, “My son has taken on the world and won. I am so proud of him, but I want more money now.” Both Azhar and Rubina attended the Oscar ceremony in February, Azhar accompanied by his mother and Latika by her uncle, and soon after the Maharashtra Housing Authority announced that both kids would be given “free houses.”

In April the filmmakers responded to further charges of exploitation by donating $747,500 to a charity for the welfare of Mumbai street children, a modest amount for a film brandishing the moral authority of these destitute kids, made for only $15 million while grossing $350 million.

In May Azhar was awakened by unannounced bulldozers demolishing his Mumbai slum home as part of a drive against illegal shanties, and the next week Rubina’s shanty home was razed to make way for an overpass. Rubina and her father were briefly hospitalized, and “Slumdog” director Boyle and producer Colson then announced that in addition to the education trust and grant to charity, they were raising the amount, revealed to have been $30,000, now to $50,000, for Azhar and Rubin to purchase new apartments, as well as giving each family a lump sum of $3,000 and $130 a month stipend.

Then in June it was announced Azhar finally got his new house, a tiny 250 square foot apartment, all that $50,000 would buy in Mumbai’s hot real estate market, casting a new light on the “post-imperialist” filmmakers’ claim of munificent reward according to local standards. Crystallizing the paternalism of this whole sideshow, the ownership of the home is to be transferred from a trust to Azhar when he turns 18, provided he completes school. As if to promise the sideshow would continue, it was announced that Rubina has signed on with Random House to publish her life story, Slumgirl Dreaming: My Journey to the Stars. Boyle is reportedly reassembling his “Slumdog” team for a future project, adapting Maximun City: Bombay Lost and Found.

Back of all this noisy fallout, it’s still the film “Slumdog” Millionaire and the novel from which it is adapted, Q & A by Vikas Swarup, that raise the deeper issues. Like director Boyle wooing the Chinese, both film and novel adopt fundamentally anti-Western postures. The book’s hero, Ram Mohammad Thomas, suffers much at the hands of Catholic priests (some gay), malevolent Australian diplomats, English-speaking tourists, and Westernized figures like gangsters and movie stars (some also gay). In the film most of hero Jamal’s antagonists – police, beggar-chiefs, gangsters, the TV host (none gay), are visual figures out of Western media, a motif wickedly established when the child Jamal dunks in outhouse sewage for a photo autograph by a helicopter-borne Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan. For novelist Swarup, a diplomat from a line of distinguished Indian lawyers, there is some irony here, as he is beneficiary of the two great Britannic legacies, the English language in which he writes and which most of the film speaks and the common law.

Moreover, the very narrative hook of the novel, the improbable quiz show leading to the fulfillment of dreams of wealth and love, constructs a state of mind: what you know that is most important is simply the inscription of the injustices you have suffered. It is the epistemology of victimhood, the right answers magically accessible to the wretched, or so “it is written.”

At the heart of any current look at India is the key issue of economic development, and both the film and book display related views. Globalization in India, while bringing slick modern media and flashy urban nightlife, is viewed as little different from the old imperialism, with slums and beggars replaced by ugly concrete construction and chai wallahs in phone call centers, an extremely discontented, leftist view of globalization as simply a worldwide extension of the old exploitative gangster/hooker relationships of capitalism, enforced by oppressive police. Such is “Slumdog’s” facile, distorted view of modern India.

This year 700 million Indians voted in month-long elections that returned the secular Congress party to power, an endorsement of religious toleration in a complex land with a Hindu majority plus a minority of the world’s second largest Muslim population. Since moving away from Soviet-style socialism and protectionism, India has been growing almost as fast as China, and now contains a middle class of about 200 million people. To suggest that this enduringly secular, agonizingly multicultural, authentically democratic, free market miracle is little more than a corrupted media show is delusional. As if to repudiate the film’s facile view, the entire subsequent saga of Azhar and Rubina’s pay and housing can stand as a case study of the vulnerability of those at the bottom in the third world, not without luck but without legally recorded and capitalized property as described by economist Hernando de Soto.

Regarding the film as an “outsider’s view” of India, the filmmakers have trumpeted their veneration of Bollywood films, especially the masala genre, and “Slumdog” is full of many of its elements and conventions, notably veteran actors, the score, and the final musical production number, as a kind of assertion of authenticity. This hardly proves a “post-imperialist” mindset. Hollywood films have been voracious appropriators of international trends, notably any avant-garde style, especially since WWII, when their audience increasingly became a youth audience and their business increasingly the sale of figures and tales of rebellion, like the “New Wave” Bonnie and Clyde, to the young. Director Boyle is an accomplished contemporary film stylist, comfortable with post-modern irony and pastiche, as in his successful “Trainspotting,” a breathless pixilation of charming young lowlife junkies.

Adaptation of a novel to film is usually a process of reduction and activation, and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy did a skillful job on “Slumdog,” eliminating characters, simplifying events, constructing the romance, and setting a ticking clock for the last act. There is, however, one change that involves more than streamlining. The novel’s protagonist is named Ram Mohammad Thomas because he is an orphan raised by a Catholic priest named Thomas in a religiously mixed community of Hindus (Ram) and Muslims (Mohammad), a personification of religious toleration appropriate to anyone with hope for India. The film changes this, with Ram, now Jamal, and his friend Salim now brothers in parallel lives, a trope of Indian gangster films, but both Muslim victims of Hindu mob violence, no less than the murder of their mother. As Jamal captains the triumphant main plot of the quiz show and romance, Salim works the parallel gangster/success subplot until its end in renunciation, when aspiring gangster Salim explodes against his false compatriots. Reminiscent of the classic film gangster’s moment of tragic recognition, the martyred Salim, now bathed in cash (millions?), goes out declaring “God is great.”

In Boyle’s flashy, fragmented, rhythmic style this renders an aspect of the film’s resolution a jihadi music video. Why would these “post-imperialist” Western filmmakers give this film such an Islamist twist? Perhaps it is just the same savvy recognition of their young audience that leads A-list Hollywood types to wear keffiyeh scarves as markers of hip transgressive style.

Perhaps it’s akin to what Michael J. Totten has called the “Orientalism of fools,” maybe even an expression of a suicidal self-loathing, an endgame for Western radicalism, which has been an attitude of the leftist cultural elite for some time.