The White Tiger', which debuts Friday on Netflix, is the kind of widescreen epic of class struggle about an ambitious, cunning climber that has long been a rich domain of movies. Director Ramin Bahrani may have begun as a neorealist but 'The White Tiger' finds him reaching for the operatic heights of Good-fellas.
He doesn't get there. But 'The White Tiger', about a loyal chauffer to a corrupt landlord in India, is an engrossing tale of servant and master that makes a dynamic portrait of the world's largest democracy, and the caste system that divides it.
Based on Aravind Adiga's Booker Prize-winning novel, the movie has been directed by Ramin Bahrani. Adiga's book was a brutally frank indictment of India's socio-economic divides, the callousness of the wealthy towards their own employees and the hopelessness of the poor, hemmed in as they are by the exploitative upper echelons of society, politicians who promise everything but deliver nothing and centuries of social conditioning that leave large sections of the distressed classes incapable of rebelling. Adiga's book, published in 2008, was a well-deserved slap in India's face, written with dark humour and unapologetic honesty, but it also displayed a poor understanding of the
caste system and was unconvincing in its bid to speak through the voice of the once-poverty-stricken protagonist, Balram Halwai.
Bahrani's film embraces the book's upper-caste take on caste, but deletes several scathing passages by Adiga that reveal the hero's disdain for Hinduism, especially his use of a beloved Hindu deity to explain subservience in India.
Rajkummar Rao appears to be lost in the film. His character (Ashok) grew up in India and moved abroad after having already cemented his speech patterns. The 'Chhalaang' star was too much preoccupied with his accent as he appeared to pressure himself for sounding American, due to which his visible discomfort got in the way of his performance.
Priyanka Chopra Jonas was excellent as the feisty Pinky, who seems to be in a constant state of compromise.
It's a star-making performance by newcomer Adarsh Gourav, who not only manages to grab the proverbial bull by the horns, but also reins it in. He's an Angry Young Man for post-Modi India, much like what Amitabh Bachchan was for the Emergency generation — an embodiment of rage, restlessness and rebellion directed at the establishment.
Bahrani, with Paolo Carnera's vivid cinematography, builds a dense, incisive film that nevertheless feels uneven in structure. The movie is so invested in the mentality of the slave-master relationship between Balram and Ashok, the landlord's hipster son, that it overwhelms. Almost
as soon as Balram, through bloodshed and Machiavellian guile, achieves independence, The White Tiger is wrapping up.