The White Tiger is the rousing new film by Indian director Ramin Bahrani, who stacked up accolades for Goodbye Solo, Chop Shop and 99 Homes, but hasn’t enjoyed the huge platform that Netflix now affords him. Bahrani’s partnership with the world’s biggest streamer makes sense, especially for this project — it’s an international crossover story set in India, a growing target for Netflix content, and based on Indian-Australian author Aravind Adiga’s critically hailed novel. Now, can I say The White Tiger rules, rocks and kicks ass without sounding corny? Maybe not — but here’s the reasoning behind my enthusiasm.
The Gist: Balram (Adarsh Gourav) sits in the backseat of an SUV. For some reason, he’s wearing a Maharaji costume. For good reason, he’s freaking out, because the vehicle’s going way too f—ing fast. Pinky Madam (Priyanka Chopra) is behind the wheel, probably drunk, and she’s whooping it up with Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) in the passenger seat. It’s dark. They zoom past what appear to be homeless people by the side of the road. They barely dodge a cow. The shape of a person runs in front of the vehicle and Balram shouts. Cut. That was several years back. Balram narrates. It’s his story. We’ll return to the nearly out-of-control SUV in a bit; this is how he got there, a servant kowtowing to rich people for a paltry salary, eventually in a wretched predicament, for without such high drama, this might not be the riveting film it is.
We see Balram in a swanky pad, the ends of his mustache exquisitely waxed into little curls, jewelry adorning his fingers and wrists. “The Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked,” he says, narrating a letter he writes to the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao. Balram works in Bangalore, India’s version of Silicon Valley. “America is so yesterday,” he quips, and those of us who are Americans kind of uncomfortably have to agree. His life wasn’t always this way: “We should start,” he says with a twinkle in the eye of his voice, “by kissing some god’s foot.” Hindu, Christian, Muslim, whatever, it probably doesn’t matter. He grew up in the dusty village of Laxmangarh, under the thumb of his domineering grandmother (Kamlesh Gill). His father was beaten down, eventually dead of tuberculosis. There’s no mention of his mother. Teenage Balram sits in the dirt, pounding rocks with a hammer, under Granny’s orders. Why, I’m not sure, maybe I missed it, maybe it doesn’t matter, but the metaphor for pointlessness is what matters. He pounds rocks.
Balram narrates about how so many Indian men are roosters trapped in a cage, but he learned how to break out of it. He grew up without electricity or toilets, without even knowing what the internet is. Every so often, the town’s rich landlord comes by to shake everyone down for rent, or “taxes,” or whatever you want to call the rich cruelly oppressing the poor, enforced by a man known as the Mongoose (Vijay Maurya). Balram overhears the landlord’s need for a driver, so he borrows money from Granny for driving lessons, promising to pay her back and then some so she’ll agree with it, when he gets the job. Which he does, by earnestly and naively playing his role as a lower-caste Indian citizen born to be a servant to the rich. He’s assigned to be the driver for the landlord’s son, Ashok, back home in India after several years in America, where he met and married Pinky. Balram pilots Ashok around to various heads of state on a bribery tour, so the family can avoid taxation. Sometimes, Ashok is like a friend to Balram. They play tennis or video games together. Other times, he’s abusive and demeaning. Ashok slaps Balram and calls him names. Eventually, we catch up to the speeding SUV, which becomes a turning point in Balram’s story. “My story gets much darker from here,” he says. And it does. I’ll vouch for him.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Balram side-eyes Slumdog Millionaire by asserting that his life doesn’t change by winning a million rupees in a TV game show. The White Tiger also rummages around in class-divide dark comedy just like Parasite does, and I don’t make the comparison lightly.
Performance Worth Watching: Watch this movie, and you’ll want to shuttle Gourav right to the front of the Oscar race. His performance is lively, spirited, funny, sympathetic, frightening and many other things. Most importantly, he’s thoroughly convincing in his portrayal of a man on slow boil, transforming from jejune naif to shrewd entrepreneur, from anonymous member of the servant class to an individual in charge of his destiny.
Memorable Dialogue: From the mouth of a peasant: “If I were in charge of India, I’d get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy,” Balram asserts.
Sex and Skin: One brief scene that amounts to nothing, really.
Our Take: The Coen Brothers once described directing as “tone management,” and The White Tiger carves that statement in stone. The film is an extraordinary collaboration between Bahrani — who also wrote the screenplay — and his cast, who hit the sweetest spot among lively comedy, gutsy drama and incisive social commentary. It’s a surprising, unlikely marriage of cynicism and hope. It spits acid satire. It wrestles with class, faith, morality. It makes our eyes widen. It makes us laugh out loud.
It also nearly tempts us to believe that murder is justifiable. It’s a sneaky bastard that way, this movie.
Crucially, it tells us how it’s going to end via a bookend-flashback structure, and still manages to subvert our expectations and deliver a few shifty knockout punches — and punchlines — in the final moments. This isn’t just another saga of a humble man who breaks bad; it offers a refreshing angle on the formula, bolstered by Bahrani’s lively, confident direction. You’ll pull up a chair to watch it, and two-thirds through, you’ll look down and realize you’re sitting on a powder keg. And that’s because Gourav is so beguiling as a naif who finds the courage and means — ugly and scary and morally compromising as they may be — to rage against a machine that’s ground his kind down for far, far too long, to prove that busting the caste system in India isn’t about participating in some lame-ass pollyanna dream-big pray-hard quiz show.
Our Call: Stream The White Tiger, then STREAM IT again.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.
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