Millions

365 Films

Entry #126

Millions (2004)

Directed by Danny Boyle

Millions occupies a somewhat mystifying spot in directory Danny Boyle’s list of credits.  Where his previous entries (and subsequent as well) mixed his amphetamine fueled editing style with nihilistic tales of selfish, amoral people doing horrible things to each other, Millions keeps the hyperactive but responds with something resembling innocence and hope.  Granted, Mr. Boyle would go on to repeat this trick with his Oscar sweeping hit Slumdog Millionaire, but it has always been my contention that Millions if the film he should have won for.  It is, far and away, his best film and the fact that it seems to have faded quietly from existence has always been a point of contention between the movie going populace and myself.  Essentially taking the “group of friends find a bag of lost money” and inverting it to the world of childhood, Millions is almost a lullaby corrective to another 365 entry, A Simple Plan.  Following this idea to its natural conclusion, Boyle and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce posit that main character Damien (Alex Etel) would naturally seek to do as much good for the world at large with the money as humanly possible.  Anonymous donations and rounding up homeless people for a free lunch occupy most of Damien’s free time while his older brother Anthony primarily seeks to attain status and style while using the money to create more money through sound real estate investments.  In other words, this isn’t a story of two greed-obsessed children who kill everybody in their path in order to hoard their stash of ill-gotten gains.  After that writing that sentence, I have to admit that movie actually sounds kind of interesting, I’ll offer that as my act of forgiveness towards the movie going populace, you’re welcome.  Millions is a movie about how childhood lends us the natural inclination to respond to inner despair with outward hope.  Essentially it is the moment when we realize (at whatever age) that we are not just ourselves on this planet, but citizens of the world along with everybody else.  It sounds like a heavy concept ripe for opportunities of over powering sentiment but Boyle does something really interesting here.  He makes a movie about childhood that doesn’t talk down to or demean the children it is depicting.  His restless visual vocabulary does not come off as a shameless grab for attention, but rather a genuine attempt that depicting the world the way a child would see it.  I would also be remiss not to mention the certifiably astounding performance from Mr. Etel, surely one of the great child performances of the last decade (maybe even last half century).  The ability he possesses at conveying a true sense of wonderment, while all the while allowing that ever so slightly devious Cheshire cat grin to take over his smile is a thing of beauty.  It’s so gracefully natural a performance, never once stooping to precocious child actor tics or begging for our sympathies with a nauseating display of cuteness.   In fact, that is the film’s most endearing quality and what makes it stand out in what is all too often a completely rotten field of movies aimed at children: it never sells us anything.  It’s more like an invitation to share in a personal remembrance about something, something neither party can quite recollect exactly but both understand completely.