Pre-Screening Stance:

The White Tiger is directed by Ramin Bahrani, the one-time indie darling of flicks like Chop Shop and Man Push Cart, who’s moving up the celebrity food chain as of late. It’s also based on a book (I know, I know) that won The Booker Prize.

Post-Screening Ramble:

Ramin Bahrani’s The White Tiger is a solid piece of filmmaking that drags in the middle before rushing the landing, jumbling the message of the piece in the process. The story of Balram (a fantastic Adarsh Gourav) – told in the form of future Balram writing a letter to a Chinese diplomat about past Balram’s story – isn’t exactly a new one. A poor kid comes from the country to try and make his way as a servant for a wealthy family, he gets dragged into some bad business and is irrevocably changed in the process. In this case, Balram finds himself – after some particularly amoral meddling – as the driver for a wealthy family of pseudo-criminals, specifically their youngest son Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) and his Indian-American wife, Pinky (Priyanka Chopra). The film centers around Balram’s increasingly disillusionment not only with Ashok and Pinky as people, but with the concept of rich and poor in India. It is, for the first forty minutes, entertaining, relatively flashy, a sort of Indian Goodfellas with less crime and violence. Somewhere in the third act though, the director clumps together too many scenes trying to hammer his point – human beings are inherently selfish, every one of them climbing over the next to try to get further on the journey – and the film slows, unraveling slightly as it does, the focused message of earlier scenes giving way to a scrambled mess of moral perspective. It’s a good enough film, a well-shot vehicle for Adarsh Gourav, but after the dull middle, it never really regains its footing. It hits Netflix this Friday, January 22.

One Last Thought:

Netflix, do you not have editors on your staff?