There’s a point in The White Tiger, where Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav), after a major and dramatic wake-up call in his career as a driver for a wealthy family, laments on the state of being poor in India. In voice-over narration he comments, “I was trapped in the rooster coop, and don’t believe for a second there’s a million-rupee game show you can win to get out of it.” This isn’t the only time the movie dispels the somewhat romanticized portrait of Indian wealth inequity exported by the likes of Slumdog Millionaire, but it is the most direct. For Balram, who knows the rigidity of the caste system very well, below a certain wealth threshold it is a torturous life with few prospects; and he will do whatever it takes to keep from sinking back into it.
The White Tiger is based on the novel by Arvind Adiga, a dark satire on the Indian caste system in the twenty-first century, a story that starts out like Great Expectations, but ultimately turns into The Godfather by way of Parasite. It’s here coming from writer-director Ramin Bahrani and Netflix, proven translators of global stories (or in Bahrani’s case, American immigrant stories) for American audiences, and luckily The White Tiger doesn’t appear to condescend in doing so, even while it takes the time to explain certain things that don’t need the clarification in India. But some of the streamlining does work better to the films’ benefit.
Balram’s condensing the caste system down to essentially rich and poor is a good example of this, primarily in his colourful rooster coop metaphor that he cites numerous times in the film, by which the lower classes are trapped in a cycle of oppression and fatalism. Servitude is emphasized in connection to this, of both a mental and literal kind, Balram noting his own inclination towards feeling like a servant even in circumstances where he has no master. For the bulk of the film though he does, as a loyal driver for Ashok the son of a coal magnate, played by Rajkummar Rao with the same niceties but low-key entitlement that characterized the Park family of Parasite.
We’re introduced to him, alongside his American-born wife Pinky, played by Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and Balram himself at the start of the film in a context-free drunken cavort through some part of Delhi, her at the wheel, just as they’re about to hit someone. Balram’s narration interrupts, in typical fashion of those cliché openings to outrageous comedies (parodies of which are a cliché now themselves). But this is quite a self-aware movie and the situation at hand unmistakably serious. As we find out, its’ ostensibly the moment that defines
Balrams’ character arc, and there’s a bleak cynicism to how it’s illustrated in this way.
It sets the tone for the movie, itself pretty cynical as Balram guides the audience through his rags to riches narrative, offering insight and colourful social and political criticism along the way, though perhaps unreliably as in instances even he doesn’t seem too bothered by what he goes through. There are things he doesn’t question that he maybe should, and by the end he doesn’t seem to mind how he profits off of that same system. The film is better for this though, and honestly reminds me in some respects of Goodfellas, with its’ similar first-person device and a conscious ignorance on the part of its’ protagonist. And Adarsh Gourav is certainly as good as Ray Liotta, if not better. It’s a measured performance, revealing more as it goes along, Gourav demonstrating a vast range from excited wide-eyed innocence to secure resilient solemnity. He gets in a lot of really great moments, like when he convinces his employers on a trip to his home village that multiple random trees are locally sacred; and one beautiful burst of madness during a particularly bad time when he and some other unfortunate meet at the same spot to defecate in a hole in the ground.
It sets the tone for the movie, itself pretty cynical as Balram guides the audience through his rags to riches narrative, offering insight and colourful social and political criticism along the way, though perhaps unreliably as in instances even he doesn’t seem too bothered by what he goes through. There are things he doesn’t question that he maybe should, and by the end he doesn’t seem to mind how he profits off of that same system. The film is better for this though, and honestly reminds me in some respects of Goodfellas, with its’ similar first-person device and a conscious ignorance on the part of its’ protagonist. And Adarsh Gourav is certainly as good as Ray Liotta, if not better. It’s a measured performance, revealing more as it goes along, Gourav demonstrating a vast range from excited wide-eyed innocence to secure resilient solemnity. He gets in a lot of really great moments, like when he convinces his employers on a trip to his home village that multiple random trees are locally sacred; and one beautiful burst of madness during a particularly bad time when he and some other unfortunate meet at the same spot to defecate in a hole in the ground.
Rao and Chopra Jonas are quite good too, the former in his underlying smugness and the latter in her cultural naiveté. That uniquely modern veneer of friendliness by those of higher social status towards the underprivileged and feigned curiosity in their world and reality is epitomized pretty successfully in these two. Pinky though is the American avatar expressing disgust at the peasant-like treatment of Balram, and does eventually make the responsible choice in relation to Ashoks’ family. But the movie makes clear it is a gesture only, and doesn’t do much to help Balrams’ situation. Nobody with the power to do so will.
It is the point that Balram realizes this, not long after the aforementioned car accident, that the movie makes some big and drastic choices. The divisions become more urgent, the anger more pronounced, the film even seems to drift between genres as Balram takes greater control and begins to upend the rooster coop he feels trapped in. Bahrani sets it up carefully, maintaining the humour and naturalistic atmosphere of the early running so that the plunging of Balram further into morally ambiguous actions feels cohesive and satisfying, if also a touch scary. The message seems to be that to truly break free of the poverty cycle, one has to be corrupted at least to some degree by it. We saw its’ beginning when Balram blackmailed his predecessor out of the job (involving Islamaphobia no less), and its’ zenith late in the film marked by blood and money. For as grim as it is though, Balram (and Bahrani somewhat) articulate this journey without judgement, critiquing and condemning India’s structural inequality with honesty, but subjectivity too –as though Balram’s whole story were merely a manual, a how-to guide to gaming the system that just happens to feature some ethically horrible avenues. And if that was in some way the intent of the book, Bahrani realized it excellently.
The films’ title comes from Balrams’ sense of self-assuredness; he was labeled a rare “white tiger” when he was young for his academic acuity and early mastery of English –and it’s later a white tiger that inspires his greatest leap. However, the reason The White Tiger works and translates so well may be that it’s not so unique, or rather its’ India isn’t. These same obstacles and structures designed to keep down the impoverished cross borders and oceans, and Balrams’ solution cannot be the only one to overpower them.
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