The White Tiger

Move over, Slumdog Millionaire. This is the real deal.

Ramin Bahrani's sprawling tale of a poor young Indian man who rises to become an entrepreneur is an epic saga of inequality, poverty, and corruption. Adapted from the Man Booker Prize-winning novel by Aravind Adiga, it is not your typical feel-good story about plucky self-realization. A first-person narrator, Balram (the extraordinary Adarsh Gourav), tells us his story from rags to riches. The movie begins in the middle when Balram’s eventful life takes a turn for the worse. But at that moment we don’t know who he is. We see him joyously riding in a car with friends. We are in for a rude awakening.

The movie is richly novelistic in its storytelling and in its keen observation of the codependent and perverse relationship between the rich and the poor. In developed countries like the US, the poor and the rich rarely ever intertwine. But in countries like India or Mexico, where I am from, poor servants live in rich houses but are treated as second class humans. The things that happen in this movie may come as a shock to American audiences, but not to anyone who has ever lived in a developing country. Even though it is a story about India, with its cultural and religious particularities, like the caste system, India is not that different from any other developing country. The contempt, fear, and exploitation of the poor are the same…