The White Tiger Parent Guide

Growing up in rural India, Balram (Adarsh Gourav) spent his childhood in absolute poverty. When his father (Satish Kumar) fails to pay the local landlord, Balram is pulled out of school and put to work in his grandmother’s tea business. But the time he spent learning to read and write fostered in him a sense of determination to escape his difficult, dangerous, and frequently dirty life. When he meets Ashok (Rajkummar Rao), the wealthy son of his landlord who has recently returned from America, he hatches a plan to go to work as Ashok’s driver. But even with that dream achieved, Balram is only beginning to realize how difficult his aspirations will be…

I’ve reviewed a few Indian Netflix movies, and they’re a mixed bag. There seem to be a lot of specific cultural tropes and preferences which just don’t translate well for North Americans, and I usually end up feeling somewhat confused. Not so here: The White Tiger, while positively dripping with Indian culture, follows a story that is much more approachable to a Western audience.

That, in my view, is a good thing. This movie has a lot to offer by way of social commentary and some genuinely impressive performances from the lead cast. The film I was most frequently reminded of is Parasite, which is promising, given that Parasite took home a Best Picture Oscar. Balram is functionally a serf in his hometown, little more than a tenant laborer for the local landlord. What is fascinating is that in his infiltration of the higher caste, wealthy society is not portrayed as some utopia: it is just another dysfunctional system, one in which everything is commodified and people are treated as disposable. What’s even more compelling is what Balram has to give up to gain access to this closed group, and what that says about Indian capitalism as a whole.

This isn’t exactly family movie night fare, with a sizeable helping of profanity, brief bloody violence, and some drug use. None of this is portrayed particularly positively, but that doesn’t make it any easier to explain to your ten-year-old. But, frankly, it’s probably easier to explain the profanity to your child than the films more focused approach to late-capitalist malaise and critiques of an increasingly complex and dehumanized global economy. This isn’t easy watching: it’s long, it’s tough, and it’s going to ask you some hard questions. But it is remarkably compelling, and if you can handle the content, I think you should give it a look.