The White Tiger (2021)

(Netflix Streaming, July 2022) I’ve seen more than a few reviews comparing The White Tiger to Slumdog Millionaire, which initially feels like a cheap comparison. After all, it’s not because you’ve got two western-produced rags-to-riches movies set in India that they are the same—you could argue that it’s an act of western imperialism to conflate films based on mere setting, and that’s before even getting into the vitality of the Indian film industries, or the bewildering diversity of India by itself. But despite first instincts, there is an interesting point of opposition between two films, one that has a lot to say about the way western filmmakers/studios/audiences/reviewers perceive films in so-called exotic (ack, ptui) contexts. The White Tiger, at a very superficial glance, does seem to typify the kind of story that audiences crave: how a promising young man rises through a stratified society to become his own boss, acquiring riches along the way. Entire genres of American literature have been built on such narratives. Who doesn’t love an underdog? But from the very first moments of the film (which is framed as a letter from our protagonist to the visiting Chinese Prime Minister), something feels off—and the rest of the film all leads to a conclusion that trashes the usual standards of decency, eventually flaunting its transgressions as a demonstration that the future does not belong to the honourable white man. It gets very, very dark, and in a way that has far more to do with sociopathic glorifications of hustling than the Horatio Alger plucky-young-man-does-good literary archetype. The tone is deeply cynical to the point where the film (adapted from a similarly caustic novel) doesn’t really go for outright moral condemnation. If the future does belong to those ready to kill in order to succeed, perhaps everyone else should stay in the coop where life is predictable and usually bearable. It does (or doesn’t?) help that the film is slickly executed by screenwriter-director Ramin Bahrani—grittily portraying a slice of Indian life over the past few decades with a minimum of sentimentality and plenty of jaundice. It’s disturbing if you dig into its amoral core, and as such offers quite a contrast to Slumdog Millionaire: it’s not sweet, not romantic (almost anti-romantic, in fact), and definitely not honourable. For western viewers, it presents a conundrum about expectations—is it a realistic reminder that “the other,” in reclaiming a multipolar world, is not beholden to hypocritical standards of western morality? Or does it skirt racist agitprop by demonstrating how “the other” will not be stopped by the niceties held as ideal by western movies? Maybe both, maybe neither: the unfortunate byproduct of adapting one of tens-of-thousands of novels into one-of-dozens prestige films (especially in a rarefied area such as “western films about India”) is that the film acquires the force of a geopolitical statement that the novel is not really built for. Far more people will ever see The White Tiger than will read it, and far more opinion pieces will be written about it as well.