The White Tiger: A caustic and cynical comic answer to Slumdog Millionaire
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A minus
A caustic, comic tale of rags-to-riches to moral collapse, the new Netflix movie The White Tiger is director Ramin Bahrani’s adaption of the 2008 Booker Prize-winning satiric novel by the Indian-born, Oxford-educated, former Time magazine correspondent Aravind Adiga.
If Slumdog Millionaire, which was released the same year as Adiga’s novel, is indebted to Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, Bahrani’s film closer in spirit to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a shaggy-dog tale from an unreliable narrator, about a culture caught between traditional servitude and modern political corruption.
Not your father’s slum dog: Adarsh Gourav in The White Tiger
The entire story consists of an ambitious email pitch that the protagonist Balram (Adarsh Gourav) makes for a meeting with the former Chinese leader Wen Jiabao, on the occasion of the official’s visit to Bangalore – a.k.a. India’s answer to Silicon Valley.
Balram sets out to relate to the Chinese leader his own success story, as a kind of rare “white tiger,” an uneducated peasant turned entrepreneurial predator. His hope, he says, is that the lessons he has learned can serve as an example for the Chinese leader to emulate, as the two Asian nations emerge as economic super-powers. The path isn’t easy.
“The Indian entrepreneur,” Balram warns, “has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, all at the same time.”
The film is an intriguing detour for Bahrani. The Iranian-American director was avidly championed as the “director of the decade” by the late Roger Ebert in the early 2000s for his empathetic neo-realist minimalist dramas Man Push Cart (2005), Chop Shop (2007) and Goodbye Solo (2008).
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
Bahrani’s work in the last decade (At Any Price, 99 Homes, Fahrenheit 451) has generally disappointed. But The White Tiger, is a departure for him. The tone is mostly light and the pace propulsive, despite its weighty melodramatic themes of murder, family betrayal, and political corruption. The latter is embodied by an academic-looking female politician known as “The Great Socialist” (Swaroop Sampat) who receives duffle bags full of rupees in her suite at the Sheraton.
As a promising child student, Balram is pulled out of school to support his family in a community that’s bled dry by a local landlord/crime boss named The Stork (Mahesh Manjrekar). Eventually, a grown-up Balram finagles a job as a driver for The Stork’s American-educated hipster son, Ashok (Rajkummar Rao), who has returned to India to join the family crime business with his glamorous Indo-American wife, Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas).
When Balram lays eyes on the handsome new boss, his reaction is almost erotically charged “This was the master I had been dreaming of!” he says.
Immediately, he begins to work diligently to make himself indispensable. Superficially egalitarian and progressive, the young couple insist on using first names, make out in the backseat of the car while he drives, ask him about his hopes and dreams and marvel at his ignorance.
Both irritated and flattered by his compliments and constant hovering, they make the effort to teach helpful social lessons to their homeless employee (he lives in a squalid condo parking garage where he sleeps with other drivers). These lessons include not touching your crotch while serving tea, or brushing his teeth before work. In return for their favour, they rely on him to cover their most terrible transgressions.
There’s nothing new in noting that crime and dirty politics are fast tracks to success. (“Is it the same in your country?” Balram asks the viewer). What’s more interesting here is how The White Tiger explores the paradoxes of the master-servant dynamic. Singer-actor Gourav is marvelous in capturing the duality. His very face and posture seem stamped with his changing social class: At first, Balram’s tentative obsequiousness is both amusing and painful to watch. Later, when he masters the harsh hard lessons from his betters, he becomes glibly cruel and handsome.
“Do we loathe our masters behind a façade of love, or do we love them behind a façade of loathing?” Balram ponders to himself. The answer, of course, is both, at different times, and compulsively.
The White Tiger. Written and directed by Ramin Bahrani. Starring: Adarsh Gourav, Rajkummar Rao, Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Mahesh Manjrekar. The White Tiger is available on Netflix from Jan.22.