The White Tiger   ★★★

*ing: Adarsh Gourav, Priyanka Chopra, Rajkummar Rao

Direction: Ramin Bahrani

Ramin Bahrani’s The White Tiger, newly streaming on Netflix, has two openings, both of them startling. In Delhi, in 2007, a truck whose driver, Pinky (Priyanka Chopra), is drunk, speeds down a dangerously foggy road, swinging and swerving its way amid the night’s hidden dangers — a vehicle here, a cow there. Then the truck hits a child.

And we get thrown into opening number two, in Bangalore, circa 2010, and into the world of the man who should have been driving that truck: Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav), who in 2007 was the servant, and chauffeur of the young, rich professional Ashok (Rajkummar Rao), but who is now no one’s servant. He’s large and in charge, by all appearances, or at the very least eager to appear so. And he’s got a lot on his mind: the modern ascendance of India, among other things, and what the noticeable shift in world powers — away from the U.S., toward China — might mean for the fate of his own country. The kind of things a man of Balram’s new status is now inclined to care about, where before the only thing on his mind was becoming that man.

Now he’s here. And Balram — sharply dressed, clearly well-off, chest puffed up with conspicuously slick confidence — understands the fate of his country. He understands it because, as he sees it, it mirrors his own fate — out of the darkness of poverty, into the light of opportunity. So begins the yarn that comprises this movie: The story of how Balram got here, which is also the story of how his face landed atop, wanted posters throughout the country. Unsurprisingly, it’s a complicated story.

The White Tiger is an adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning picaresque of the same name, from 2008. Bahrani, who wrote the script, borrows freely and thoroughly from his source material, which means that Adiga’s broad social vision, his reliance on totalizing, evocative metaphors for summing up and making sense of India’s class conditions, reappear here, often to strong effect. There is the titular white tiger, a symbol of not only power, but rarity: a symbol of the individual, the exception. The kind of symbol, in other words, that a man born into Balram’s circumstances — impoverished, fatherless after the man dies of tuberculosis, school-less after his tuition is reallocated to a relative’s dowry — needs to believe in if he is to believe in himself. The India of Balram’s upbringing, as depicted in The White Tiger, is one in which the castes are so rigidly defined, boundaries so inviolable, that it would take a white tiger to defy them.

If that happens rarely, it’s in part, Balram tells us, because of the other dominant image in this movie: that of roosters in a coop, queued up for slaughter, completely aware of and witness to the slaughter of every rooster whose number is called before theirs, yet also lacking the wherewithal to make a run for it. It’s an image in which India’s poor are, as a result of the debilitating psychological effect of poverty, more apt to get in line than they are to try to flee. Balram’s sense of himself, a self-serving one to be sure, is as a white tiger. The story that Bahrani’s film tracks is that of Balram’s own will and cunning — as told by Balram.

As a story about class above most else, The White Tiger is hardly a departure for its director, whose early features Man Push Cart (2005) and Chop Shop (2007) are considered classics of the microbudget indie tradition, films about poverty that resist neatly equating it with powerlessness, and which, wearing their own skimpy resources on their sleeves, seem of a piece with the lives and conditions they depict. Bahrani’s newest film immediately announces itself as a leap forward in resources for the filmmaker; those fast, gliding shots of the aforementioned truck are a pleasant surprise. The subject of the film, with its picaresque tale of class-striving and survival by a figure at the margins of society, is nevertheless consistent with Bahrani’s interests, and often at its most nimble the closer it veers towards the director’s familiar territory.

Bahrani is a good director. He can tell a good, invigorating, thoughtful story. Followers of his work already knew as much, and the film’s source material provides him a pretty good, if not invigoratingly original, outline of such a story. For its letdowns, The White Tiger offers its writer-director an encouragingly big canvas, which is heartening for an artist whose early work managed to take an inch and run a mile, proving all the more evocative for being so streetwise and constrained. Bahrani’s new film is a sign that he has clearly not lost his ambition, even as the resulting effort falls a little short of that ambition. That, however, is the pleasure of getting to see a director of merit grow, change, across the scope of a long career — which Bahrani deserves. What The White Tiger signals isn’t a bad return on his early promise. It accomplishes the opposite: It makes me eager for what will come next.

– Courtesy: Rolling Stone Magazine

Rating system: *Not on your life * ½ If you really must waste your time ** Hardly worth the bother ** ½ Okay for a slow afternoon only
*** Good enough for a look see *** ½ Recommended viewing **** Don’t miss it **** ½ Almost perfect ***** Perfection