Living the Scheme

Born into poverty, a young man claws his way into the gilded class.

- By Bilge Ebiri

THE WHITE TIGER DIRECTED BY RAMIN BAHRANI. NETFLIX. R.

RAMIN BAHRANI is among the most American of directors—an artist who has explored the agony, irony, and tragicomic pretzel logic of that thing we so guilelessly call the American Dream—so it may feel odd, at first, to see his name on Netflix’s adaptation of The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize–winning 2008 bildungsroman about a lowly driver’s ambitious, grisly rise to success in rapidly changing India around the turn of the 21st century. The book, a global best seller that launched a thousand think pieces in its day, isn’t just about one man’s journey. It’s a totalizing, occasionally tongue-in-cheek meditation on the fractured nature of Indian society, a dense, maximalist page-turner. Bahrani, however, tends to work in a more minor key: His narratives are often spare, finding drama and poetry in glances, gestures, and subtle juxtapositions that reveal a broader vision of the world. (His first two features, Man Push Cart and Chop Shop, are getting Criterion editions this month.)

The connection makes a bit more sense if one knows that Adiga actually dedicated his novel to Bahrani; the Indian author and the Iranian American filmmaker, it turns out, have been close friends since college. But it’s still an odd fit, and perhaps Bahrani knows it. He opens