It's tough being a millionaire

Whenever there's an overwhelming favourite in the Oscar race, you can be sure, human nature being human nature, and the media being the media - in short, an institution that likes to build 'em up and then knock 'em down - that the overwhelming favourite will soon find itself fighting off a nasty backlash.

That's exactly what's happening right now in the Oscar race to Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, which in recent days has gone from beloved underdog to embattled front-runner.

When I was on the phone earlier this month with Fox Searchlight marketing chief Nancy Utley, she wondered, perhaps wanting to get an outsider's perspective, how the movie was doing.

At the time, I told her: "Not that you can really control it, but the only thing you have to worry about is peaking too soon."

I guess you can say the peaking has begun.

Alice Miles has a column in the London Times calling the film "poverty porn", hammering the writers and critics who've labelled Slumdog as a feel-good film when it is filled with "scenes of utter misery and depravity".

Time magazine posted a piece on Monday saying the film was "no hit" in India, with only 25 per cent of theatre seats occupied (an assessment hotly disputed by distributor Fox Searchlight).

A number of Mumbai, India, slum residents have objected to being labelled "slumdogs". The Los Angeles Times had a front page piece contending that "some Indians are groaning over what they see as another stereotyped depiction of their nation, accentuating squalor, corruption and impoverished if resilient natives".

And now Slate magazine has posted a withering assessment of the film by Dennis Lim, a regular contributor to the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, who scoffs at Boyle's "fairytale vision of squalid poverty", arguing that Boyle is guilty of "aestheticising poverty".

Lim is a formidable essayist, whether embracing or attacking a film, so his words pack quite a wallop. His argument, in part, goes as follows: "A slippery and self-conscious concoction, Slumdog has it both ways. It makes a show of being anchored in a real-world social context, then asks to be read as a fantasy. It ladles on brutality only to dispel it with frivolity.

"The film's evasiveness is especially dismaying when compared to the purpose and clarity of urban-poverty fables like Luis Bunuel's Los Olvidados, set among Mexico City street kids, or Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, set in inner-city Los Angeles.

"It's hard to fault Slumdog for what it is not and never tries to be. But what it is - a simulation of 'the real India', which it hasn't bothered to populate with real people - is dissonant to the point of incoherence."

Why is Slumdog suddenly coming under attack?

First off, let me put my cards on the table. Slumdog Millionaire is my favourite movie of the year, in part for the same reasons Lim despises it. Lim appears somewhat queasy that Boyle finds "tactile pleasure" wherever he looks.

For me, that is a plus, especially coming at a time when so many films seem bogged down in dreary social realism (Revolutionary Road), chilly technical perfectionism (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) or such respectful idealism that they rarely examine their leading character's flaws (Milk).

It seems unfair to thump Slumdog for something it isn't - Boyle clearly didn't intend the film to be a grim expose. And why fault it for not populating the screen with real people when, in fact, the filmmakers deliberately cast real kids from the slums, even though, from a commercial standpoint, the film would've been far more accessible if it had used better-fed, English-speaking young actors in the movie's first act.

What's far more intriguing to me is why immensely popular works of art invariably inspire a backlash. In fact, the backlash - or its first cousin, historical revisionism - is a creation of the modern media age.

Today's critics, who are invariably the torchbearers of the backlash posse, are suspicious, if not openly hostile, of any piece of art that is granted too much widespread - in other words uncritical - public acceptance.

In fact, the Slumdog crew should take the whole thing as a backhanded compliment, since you have to be incredibly successful even to inspire a backlash.

For years, pop music was haunted by this kind of cranky contrariety. But film critics have been just as quick to abandon filmmakers after the first blush of success. If a movie sells for a boatload of money at Sundance, it's instantly a target for critical second-guessing, simply because of its newfound notoriety.

In fact, the true art of Oscar marketing these days is the strategy of lowering expectations. Fox Searchlight has tried, in vain, to keep a lid on the tsunami of affection that Slumdog has inspired not just from critics but also from rank and file moviegoers, having bought far fewer "For Your Consideration" ads and staged far fewer media events than its competition, in the hopes of allowing Slumdog a few more precious weeks of flying under the backlash radar.

But now the movie is under fire.

One of the worst afflictions of our media age is that many of our most persuasive cultural apparatchiks are almost instinctively wary of commercial success, as if it were a curse instead of a delightful, altogether unlikely blessing for an artist.

Whether you're a critic or simply a loyal fan, when you see a film that rocks your world, don't second-guess your instincts. There's nothing wrong with love at first sight.