White Tiger better left on the pages
The White Tiger seems like it fares better on the page than on the small screen
I always take notes during screenings. Sometime it's little things, like a licence plate indicating where a generic American story is taking place, or a mailbox giving away that it was actually shot in Canada. I might jot down a character name so I don't forget it, an idiosyncratic tic, a song title or an example of great editing.
My notes for The White Tiger are mostly full of quotations. And a quick trip to goodreads.com after the movie confirmed what I half-suspected: all the best lines are lifted directly from Aravind Adiga's Man Booker Prize-winning novel of 2008.
That's not necessarily a bad sign. But in this case it suggests that the best things about this story take place on the page, not the screen. Watching The White Tiger — framed, like the novel, as a letter from budding entrepreneur Balram Halwai to then-premier Wen Jiabao on the occasion of a state visit from China to India — feels more like an audio book than a true adaptation.
Indian actor and singer-songwriter Adarsh Gourav stars as Balram, whose low birth and caste would seem to place success out of his reach. The best he can hope is to become a highplaced servant, and so he sets out to make that happen, ingratiating himself to a wealthy businessman (Mahesh Manjrekar) and becoming the driver for the man's son, Ashok.
There's a touch of David Copperfield in Gourav's rags-to-he-hopes-riches story. If we accept that modern India is in part the offspring of colonial Britain, then that former empire's Dickensian economic system still holds sway there.
But Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) is part of the new India — American-educated, liberal and egalitarian. “Don't call me sir,” he tells Balram. Ashok's wife, Pinky (Priyanka Chopra), is even more westernized, having lived in America from the age of 12. She's now a tourist in her own homeland.
Even so, Balram never forgets his place, though that doesn't stop him dreaming and eventually scheming to climb past his station in life. “If only a man could spit his past out so easily,” he muses while brushing his teeth.
But he's also a realist, at one point taking a swipe at Danny Boyle's 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire. “I was trapped, and don't believe for a second there's a million-rupee game show you can win to get out of it,” he says, a line that seems to be new to writer-director Ramin Bahrani's adaptation.
There's something of an economic throughline to Bahrani's work. He made a name for himself with 2005's Man Push Cart and 2008's Goodbye Solo, two low-budget movies about immigrants trying to make a living in America. But 2014 brought the underrated 99 Homes, set during the 2008 financial crisis and starring Michael Shannon and Andrew Garfield. Though his latest, 2018's Fahrenheit 451, was a misfire. There was a disappointing première in Cannes that year, and the movie never even got a theatrical release in Canada.
It was also, perhaps coincidentally, another adaptation of a beloved novel by the filmmaker. Bahrani seems to produce his best work when he starts with his own words and doesn't have to lean on those of others. That's a note he can take if he wants.