Adapted by writer-director Ramin Bahrani from Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning debut novel, “The White Tiger” is a dark satire of upward mobility, a cross between a Dickensian bildungsroman and a Patricia Highsmith psychothriller. There is slaughter to come, to be sure, but his personal story - sometimes grim, sometimes funny (and sometimes both) - is ultimately one of odds-defying personal triumph. Will this low-caste villager turn out to be the white tiger, that rarest and most remarkable of jungle dwellers, born only once in a generation? Or will he be just another of the cooped-up roosters who, the movie suggests, make up the vast majority of Indian society, never questioning the terms of their imprisonment and calmly awaiting their slaughter?īalram, introducing himself as a successful business owner circa 2010, answers that question with witty self-assurance. It isn’t the only caged animal in Ramin Bahrani’s engrossing if metaphorically top-heavy new movie, which presents its wily antihero, Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav), with a difficult question. The fabled beast that gives “The White Tiger” its title makes a late but striking entrance: It’s majestic and beautiful but visibly perturbed, prowling restlessly around a tight enclosure that scarcely seems capable of containing it.
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