Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-

How might The White Tiger have done at the box office under normal circumstances, I wonder? “Normal” is relative, of course, and no more so than right now. Still, consider Slumdog Millionaire, a very good movie which still rode the wave of being over-hyped all the way to winning an undeserved Best Picture Oscar in 2009. The White Tiger could be today’s version of that movie, but it could never enjoy the same success. The key difference is that the earlier film is ultimately a fantasy about someone’s dreams coming true on a gameshow, whereas this film is not just about someone rising to the top in India, but what it truly costs to get there. It’s not a sunny picture.

Writer-director Ramin Bahrani, adapting from the best-selling 2008 novel by Aravind Adiga, still manages to make The White Tiger very entertaining much of the time. It’s a slightly deceptive move. Spoiler alert! This is not a “feel-good movie.” It’s a compelling one though, and by degrees provocative, in its examinations of rigid class structures in India and how those barriers are broken or crossed.

Told in voice-over narration by the protagonist, Balram (Adarsh Gourav), we start in his childhood in a village barely scraping by as the villagers have to hand over their earnings to a family that lords power over them. Balram loses his dad, and in young adulthood faces the same fate as his older brother, a marriage that also traps him there for the rest of his life. One of the best lines in this movie is when Balram says, “Rich men are born with opportunities they can waste.” Belram demonstrates well before this line is uttered that the poor have no such luxury, and he bullshits his way into becoming the driver for Ashok (Rajkummar Rao), the grown son of the family who takes most of the village’s money.

What follows is an incisive examination of how society runs in India, the rick and the poor alike referring to the country’s self-image as a “democracy” with contempt. Balram notes early on how he’s learned the importance of not being “a poor man in a free democracy.” A large amount of American influence is woven into the story, with Ahok’s fiance, Pinky (Priyanka Chopra), having returned with him after growing up in the U.S. Ashok has also spent a lot of time there—it’s where they met—but Pinky is the only character in this movie who speaks with an American accent. She’s still as fluent in Hindi as any of the others, though. (Both Hindi and English are spoken about the same amount.)

Pinky brings with her a lot of idealism, as well as some naivete about how entrenched India’s classist and misogynist attitudes remain. She reacts with horror when others treat Balram, a servant, as sub-human. Then, when an accident involving all three of them happens—which we see a glimpse of in the film’s opening sequence and then is returned to halfway through—things get very complicated. The White Tiger has a lot to say about the kinds of power money has over people, and how the power differs depending on the direction from which it’s being approached. Ashok seems unusually decent at first, but in the end his behavior betrays how wealth affords such privilege that certain things considered vital by others can be blithely ignored. Not even ignored, necessarily: it doesn’t even occur to them to consider.

In stark contrast to Slumdog Millionaire, The White Tiger is not about the poor man finding success thanks to a heart of gold. This is a much more realistic story—although even that is still relative. The voiceover narration by Balram also serves as an email—quite a long email at that—he is writing to the Premier of China, who is headed to India for a visit. Balram wants to impress him with his “entrepreneurial spirit.” The conceit is a little corny, but at least it’s the only part of the film that goes solidly in that direction.

It could be said that Balram is an anti-hero, and honestly he’s never truly presented as an actual hero, so I hesitate to call that a spoiler. Bahrani his pulled a sly trick in knowing we assume this character is meant to be someone for us to root for. But The White Tiger is about much more than him: it’s a subtle takedown of class divides, and capitalism itself. Not just that, but national competition on a global scale. There are no white characters in this movie (nor are there any Black ones, for that matter), but white people get mentioned a couple of times, only in the context of getting left behind by the people of both India and China, beating America at its own corrosive, toxic economic games. This movie kind of has a point.

One could also argue that The White Tiger is Darwinist at heart. Survival of the fittest is not a moral phrase. This is a movie that reflects a changing world while illustrating that human nature, or just nature itself, remains constant. It’s a rich and complex story of what happens when a taste of ambition gets results and then becomes a cycle of its own. It’s a pretty cynical worldview on display here, but it’s still worth a look. It’s always the aberrations that get their stories told, but it’s useful to be reminded how success can be redefined by context, as well as how the idea of success being inherently honorable is a myth.

Overall: B+