Indian Tiger is burning bright
THE BIG RELEASE THE WHITE TIGER 15 ★★★★✩
THIS vigorous adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker Prize-winning best-seller could easily be called this year’s Parasite or the new Slumdog Millionaire – but The White Tiger emerges as its very own beast.
Our anti-hero is Balram (newcomer Adarsh Gourav, already at the top of his game). Raised in a dirtpoor Indian village, Balram is so remarkably bright that his teacher dubs him the ‘white tiger’ – a oncein-a-generation phenomenon with the potential to escape his underclass fate.
According to Balram, modern India has only two castes, the haves and the have-nots – and the latter are reared to be as servile as battery-farmed roosters, waiting obediently to have their heads chopped off.
Instead, Balram sticks his neck out, wheedling his way into and up the household of a wealthy crime family. He starts off as the ‘second driver’ to their youngest son, Ashok (Rajkummar Rao), and his liberated wife, Pinky (Priyanka Chopra-Jonas), who have just returned from the US. However, when a birthday joy ride goes very wrong, Balram’s values are challenged and his loyalty dramatically tested.
Given author Adiga dedicated his novel to writer-director Ramin Bahrani (the two men were at college together), it’s no surprise to find that his Balzacian fable takes a fairly seamless leap to screen here – even if the contrived framing of the narrative, as in a letter to the leader of China, worked better on the page than via an intrusive voice-over. As Balram sees it, the ‘future lies with the yellow man and the brown man’.
A potent tale of servitude realised with entertaining verve, the movie’s secret weapon is undoubtedly Gourav. Conniving and cringing while somehow simultaneously sympathetic, his charismatic performance transforms Balram from stinking underling to sleek entrepreneur. ‘Don’t think there’s a million-rupee game show you can win to get out of this,’ Balram warns us in a wink to Slumdog Millionaire. But if The White Tiger ultimately stands as a dark flipside to that Hollywood fairy tale, for Gourav it is surely his golden ticket. Out Friday on Netflix