Servant becomes master in propulsive adaptation
‘THE WHITE TIGER’ ★★★ ½
Years ago, novelist Aravind Adiga dedicated his book “The White Tiger” to filmmaker and friend Ramin Bahrani, the North Carolina-born writer-director best known for “99 Homes” and other American dreams of success, both tantalizing and corrosive.
Now Bahrani has returned the favor. The film version of “The White Tiger,” streaming Friday on Netflix, is Bahrani’s most vital, fully realized work since “Goodbye Solo,” which came out the same year as his friend Adiga’s 2008 debut novel.
A little bit “GoodFellas” in its sheer velocity, it’s a sleek, beautifully acted addition to an ancient canon of storytelling for the stage, the page and the movies. The canon in question hinges on the wily, put-upon servant outwitting his credulous and/or cruel masters. Sometimes these tales are strictly for laughs. Other times they’re a blunt, cynical reminder of human misery and caste systems everywhere, not just in India.
“The Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, all at the same time.” So says Balram Halwai by way of introduction. The Hindu villager, played by the talented musician and actor Adarsh Gourav, is first seen in the back seat of his employers’ SUV, screaming down a Delhi street late at night sometime in 2007.
Just as a young girl crosses the road, and the half-sloshed woman behind the wheel (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) realizes what’s about to happen, the action freezes and we go back to Balram’s origin story. Balram’s ancestral village is ruled by a mafiosolike landlord and his grown sons. Balram sees this clan as his opportunity for advancement, and soon enough he’s hired as an assistant driver, rug-beater and all-around factotum.
The nicer of the sons,
Ashok (Rajkummar Rao), has recently returned from America with his wife, Pinky (Chopra Jonas). Balram has never seen a couple like this: rich, and apparently getting richer. Meantime he considers himself just one more anonymous bird stuck in a “chicken coop” of a society.
Around the film’s midpoint, director Bahrani returns to the inciting tragedy on the lonely street in Delhi. The whole of “The White Tiger,” named for the rare jungle predator Balram considers his role model, is actually a letter, spoken aloud by Balram as he types. He’s writing the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, visiting India for an economic summit. That present-day framework of the story takes place in 2010. “The White Tiger” keeps an eye on clarity while keeping the pace breathless.
The moral conundrums aren’t particularly thorny, since Balram’s revenge is wellearned. Yet Bahrani works so well with the individual actors, they seem like people, not archetypes or stereotypes.
The cast brings an edge and a drive to the telling. As the onetime villager learns how his new associates do business, he soaks up what he sees like a sponge. The story takes place just as India is becoming an outsourcing capitalistic paradise for American companies.
His country, Balram says at one point, remains a chicken coop for millions. Then, in a dig at the Oscar-winning “Slumdog Millionaire,” he adds: “Don’t believe for a second there’s a million-rupee game show you can win to get out of it.”
MPAA rating: R (for language, violence and sexual material) Running time: 2:05 Premiere: Jan. 22 on Netflix.