“We will be together. It is destiny.”

If I had told this to a cute girl when we were toddlers, then fate would reward me for the rest of my life. At least, this is what I’ve learned from Slumdog Millionaire, the Oscar-sniping pathos machine directed by Danny Boyle.

Score one for good old Hollywood film-making that this isn’t a criticism of the movie, but a grudging admission of admiration. The grumpy, unromantic critic in me did not like it, for reasons you’re free to ignore below. The young, secretly sentimental, alive person in me still recommends that you stop reading right now and watch it immediately.

The film begins as a smart, honest boy from the Mumbai slums, Jamal, is brutally interrogated for his success on the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” His suspicious command of each answer is explained by a series of coincidences from his life. As Jamal’s anecdotes draw up to the present time, the disparate strands of narrative converge on a love story between him and a girl he met as a child. The rest of the movie follows his quest to find his love, and his newfound role as a folk hero to the “slumdogs” of Mumbai.

Visual beauty abounds in the seemingly perpetual Indian sunset. Colorful, off-kilter shots evoke a urbanscape of skewed horizons and naturalistic asymmetry. Musical montage sequences and flashbacks start off interesting, but eventually are so numerous that they nearly overload the movie in incoherent kitsch. I lost my suspension of disbelief around the one hour mark and started noticing irrelevant things like the inconsistency of film grain between cuts. I’m not sure whether to blame this on the writers or on an undiagnosed case of attention-deficit disorder.

The problem for me was the movie’s transparent, heavy-handed optimism, which threw success–both economic and romantic–onto a pedestal that seemed to take more from a Horatio Alger novel than a true living experience in a slum. The ending was uplifting and perhaps beautiful, but it didn’t take seriously the themes that were presented earlier. And the development of less prominent characters, such as Jamal’s troubled older brother, seemed to leave logical and emotional ends hanging outright. Was this movie made only for an American audience (or an international one, perhaps, with voting seats on the Academy)? Or, as the presence of a Bollywood co-director in the credits might suggest, could an impoverished denizen of Mumbai watch this and get the story? Would it matter if he couldn’t?

Realism, of course, isn’t an essential ingredient of a good movie. But plausibility on the terms that a story sets out for itself–in other words, believability–is important, and in this respect I think stronger slum-dwelling screenplays have been written. City of God, Tsotsi, and Amores Perros are just recent examples of movies that, for all their unevenness in other respects, manage to achieve rawness of emotion without trading away an underlying appreciation for nuance, for the complexity of the world as their writers insightfully see it.

Ultimately, though, this movie gets one thing right which makes all the difference. It is earnestly, simply, and unpretentiously romantic. If you’ll pardon my over-use of a word on this blog, this movie is about serendipity. It is about luck as a thing of beauty in itself, and how the unlikeliness of our experiences becomes the very reason that they are meaningful. As you watch the dazzling coincidences unfold on the screen, it won’t cross your mind that they are essentially ridiculous. It might simply seem that Lady Luck is showing her face under another name–Destiny.