He convinces his recalcitrant grandmother to give him the money for driving lessons in exchange for the majority of his future earnings. The decision sets Balram on a path that he describes, in his narration, with a mangled combination of triumph and shame.
TRAIN TO PAKISTAN SPARKNOTES DRIVER
The only way out of that lower-caste life was up, so when Balram overhears that the village’s Godfather-style landlord, nicknamed the Stork ( Mahesh Manjrekar), is looking for a second driver for his returned-from-America son Ashok ( Rajkummar Rao), Balram decides that person will be him. His brother was forced into an arranged marriage. Although Balram was a strong student, his grandmother pulled him out of school to work at the family tea shop, hammering chunks of coal. (A storytelling tactic lifted straight from the novel, that narration does get clunky here as an intrusion of international politics into an otherwise intimate story.) Balram is an entrepreneur, he boasts, but he came from nothing: He grew up in the rural town Laxmangarh, where his grandmother dictated every move. Gourav hardens before our eyes in a performance that flits back and forth between immature recklessness, calcifying fury, and justified braggadocio, and that multifaceted quality is key to the intentionally uncomfortable rags-to-riches nature of “The White Tiger.”īouncing between the early 2000s, 2007, and 2010, “The White Tiger” follows protagonist Balram Halwai (Gourav, and played as a child by Harshit Mahawar), who narrates his life story as part of a letter written to the (now-former) Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who is visiting India.
Bahrani sticks close to the source material, trusting lead actor Adarsh Gourav to take us through the lifetime of poverty that could inspire a moment of radicalization, and that faith is warranted. Like the work of Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid (in particular his 2008 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which Mira Nair adapted into a 2012 film starring Riz Ahmed), Adiga’s “The White Tiger” is primarily concerned with the divide between the haves and have-nots, the injustice weathered by the latter from the former, and the inciting incident that could finally spark an uprising. Although less imaginative in his world-building style here than in his 24-hour-news-cycle approach to Ray Bradbury’s seminal text, Bahrani has maintained the darkly comedic, progressively resentful energy of Adiga’s debut. In “The White Tiger,” Bahrani’s first cinematic excursion set outside of the capitalist voraciousness of the United States, the filmmaker-who both directed and wrote the screenplay for this adaptation of Indian author Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker Prize-winning novel-affixes his analytical eye upon the global underclass. Even in less-heralded work like his adaptation of the sci-fi classic “ Fahrenheit 451,” Bahrani’s loyalty to the outcasts and underdogs-to those who can step back from the status quo and imagine how much effort it would take to destroy it-shines through. In “ Man Push Cart,” a Pakistani immigrant sells bagels and coffee out of a heavy cart he drags around Manhattan in “ Chop Shop,” a 12-year-old orphan tries to find enough work in Queens to support himself and his sister in the bigger-budgeted “ At Any Price” and “ 99 Homes,” Bahrani cast up-and-comers Zac Efron and Andrew Garfield, respectively, as young men whose hope in the American Dream is shattered by familial betrayal and economic devastation. For the majority of his career, the first-generation Iranian American has extended unfussy empathy to people struggling to make sense of the ever-changing world and their place within it.
The films of Ramin Bahrani invite us to trespass into liminal space, and his sympathies are with the outsiders threatened to be left behind by those transitions.