Millions, this charming, warming fable from director Danny Boyle, marks not only the filmmaker's move into telling children's stories -- it's pure Disney, down to the dead mommy who abandons her children to a loving, well-meaning, and occasionally inattentive father -- but also his maturation as a storyteller. With its plot involving someone else's money stashed away in an attic for safekeeping, Millions recalls Boyle's Shallow Grave, released a decade ago. The new film is no less stylized than its predecessor, but it lacks the murders played for laughs and gore spilled for giggles -- the cheap nyuks of icky yucks made famous by Hitchcock and gratuitous by Tarantino. In Shallow Grave, money turned friends into enemies into corpses; it bought nothing but trouble.
Since then, Boyle's had his successes (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later . . . ) and failures (The Beach, A Life Less Ordinary), the latter films almost as notable as the former, if only because they suggested how easily a visionary could lose sight of his talents. But none suggested a film as poignant and sincere (and as funny) as Millions, populated by a true believer, Damian, who's made to look not like a madman (rather, a mad child) or martyr, but simply a sweet, righteous lad, for whom the right thing is the only thing. Damian believes that the money's a gift from God because, as he explains, "Who else would have that kind of money?"
There's not a malicious or malevolent bone in this movie's body, even when a sneering train robber shows up to collect his dough. In this setting, where a kind widower (James Nesbitt, as Ronnie, the boys' dad) can find an even sweeter woman (Daisy Donovan) with whom to begin a new relationship, evil doesn't linger for too long. It pays a quick visit, serves up a scare before bedtime, and then is dispatched before it can do any real damage.
Boyle, working from Frank Cottrell Boyce's storybook screenplay set during Christmastime (and as England makes the transition from the pound to the Euro), has made a film about faith that doesn't proselytize or condescend or judge, even when Anthony lashes into Damian for talking to figments of his imagination. It inspires us with a gentle tone; it moves us with a casual push. And the grief shared between the sons and their father is palpable and familiar: When Damian comes into his father's room and says he can't sleep in his new room, Ronnie pulls back the covers and reveals that he's been sleeping with his arm draped over two pillows hidden beneath the sheets. It's a fine, quietly heartbreaking moment.
What's most remarkable about Millions isn't just the performances, which are uniformly wonderful, or the visuals, but its decency. Arriving at a moment when religion is once more an off-limits topic, so dangerously divisive, Boyle and Boyce push aside all the noise and nonsense, and get to the most basic tenet of any religion: sacrifice. Millions is irreverent about religion -- St. Peter shows up in Damian's room to dispel the myth about the Bible's fish-and-loaves story, because what really happened is more inspirational than a story in some old book -- but proves it's possible to be devout as well.
The director is rightly hailed as a brilliant stylist, but more often than not, the audience is wowed by the visuals, to the point of feeling distanced from the action. Boyle's always been a wowie-look-at-me filmmaker, whether he's savoring the sight of a corpse splayed out on a crimson bedspread or following a junkie down the loo and into the watery muck below. Here, at last, the gloriousness of his compositions -- Damian and Anthony lying in a path of dirt as their new home constructs itself around them, children clad in blue sweaters and yellow shirts bouncing giant red balls around lush green fields -- serves only to draw us into his fairy tale. Millions has the look of a book you read to a child on the verge of sleeping and dreaming. It's vibrant and verdant and heartbreakingly inviting, begging you to escape into a lovely tale in which children, through a simple act of faith, find their own heaven on earth.
