Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Director: Ramin Bahrani, Netflix.
The White Tiger belongs to Adarsh Gourav as Balram Halwai, who channels that very explicit, razor-sharp mixture of sycophancy and fury, to come up with a stellar performance.
He sets out on an extraordinary journey about a self-made man who makes his way from a tea shop worker in a village to a successful entrepreneur in a big city. It’s an adaptation of Australian-Indian writer Aravind Adiga’s novel of the same name which won the 2008 Man Booker Prize.
This story can only come from a man who has been determined to scrape his way up the caste-class ladder in India. Someone like him is a rarity, just like a white tiger.
What Halwai, a ‘servant’, is keen to show is that his future lies in serving his master. He needs to survive and scale the ladder of authority, but first he must get into the good books of his rich landlord (Mahesh Manjrekar) and his older son (Vijay Maurya) by being at their constant beck and call. He has wily ways up his sleeve, but has to persevere until he gets to his real target, the younger US-returned son Ashok (Rajkummar Rao).
Ashok is a money man, savvy when it comes to political dealings and inducement tactics, but not schooled in the norms of life and is lonely in love. India’s international superstar, Priyanka Chopra Jonas plays his wife Pinky, a rebel in a family where rebellion doesn’t do any good.
Rao and Priyanka embody that class of people who feel a compulsion to be nice to the lower class. They slither into the shoes of their respective roles, acting as a catalyst to the volatile climax that had to be, though not as unpredictable as it turns out to be.
Director Ramin Bahrani’s savage, darkly comic adaptation drifts on the edge of being neither banal nor powerful. In a film of this stature, where the writing is taut and the dialogues memorable, rendering a witty conclusion is a humongous task.
The closing shot shows a boastful Balram: his beaming smile and that air of egotism are self-explanatory … now that he has “switched sides”.
