The servant who learns all too well

  

   Is there a payoff for being loyal servant? The question that ripples through writer/director Ramin Bahrani's richly realized adaptation of the best-selling novel, The White Tiger. 

   If you're familiar with Bahrani's work, beginning with movies such as Man Push Cart and Chop Shop, you won't be surprised to learn that the director explores the question with the skepticism, rue and powers of observation that are necessary to portray a deeply jaundiced society.

   Initially, Bahrani invites us to immerse in an upbeat story about a young villager (Adarsh Gourav) who wants to become a chauffeur as a means of escaping the confinement and poverty of his home village.

   Gourav's Balram lands a job with a wealthy family, quickly learning that advancement can require betrayal of the servants positioned immediately above him.

    Both novelistic and cinematic, White Tiger is one of the strongest movies you'll find about the enormous wealth gap that defines contemporary India -- and perhaps many other places, as well. 

    In the early part of the story, Balram is tempted to think that he's a friend of his employer's son. Rich kid Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) and his wife Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) behave as if they want to bridge the class gap that separates them from Balram. 

     Both have spent time in the US, but the hollow friendliness offered by Ashok and Pinky proves more than Balram can absorb as he distances himself from his former life, represented by a tyrannical grandmother (Kamlesh Gill) who's always willing to take him down a peg or two.

    Ashok and Pinky open Balram's eyes to the world of privilege. They tell him that the economic future belongs to the yellow and brown men of China and India. America? Not any more.

    We know that Balram will absorb the lesson because Bahrani uses a framing device that presents the story's main events in flashbacks that are narrated by Balram.  In a letter to potential Chinese investors,  he demonstrates that he's not only ambitious but astute. The naïveté of a clueless young driver has vanished.

    For much of the movie, Balram lives in a dingy parking garage beneath his employer's luxury Bangalore apartment. Still, he sees himself as a man on the rise. His ebullient optimism and adaptive skills help give the movie its drive. 

    White Tiger brims with social and psychological asides. Pinky tries to impose her American feminist views on a culture that has no interest in them. She and her husband are hard-partying reckless young people with money. You don't need to be a seer to know where their true loyalties lie.

   About midway through, Bahrani makes a daring shift in mood when Ashok, Pinky and Balram are involved in an automobile accident. 

    Suddenly, a young man who only recently learned to brush his teeth is thrust into the middle of a cover-up that threatens to ruin his life.

    The man who holds the purse strings -- Ashok's controlling  father (Mahesh Manjrekar) -- feigns no interest in those who serve him unless he wants to use them. 

   More socially oriented than political, the story's arc is one in which Balram learns that loyalty can be worthless in a society in which money trumps virtue. Wealth insulates the rich from the consequences of their irresponsible behavior.

   Author Aravind Adiga's novel gives Bahrani an opportunity to make a character-driven movie that seduces us with its infectious energies while painting an alarming portrait of a society composed entirely of those who have a lot and those who have nothing.

    Gourav gives an engaging performance, deeply embodying the conflict of a servant who understands that servility is the key to his success. At the same time, that servility keeps him from gaining a foothold in the life that hovers so alluringly above him -- at least until he learns the harsh lessons the system teaches.

     Bahrani wraps satire, humor and drama around a story in which Balram reaches a deeply pragmatic if morally dubious conclusion: Better to be fed than to be fed upon.

When houses stop being homes

99 Homes humanizes the devastations of the mortgage crisis.

In 99 Homes, director Ramin Bahrani -- who made his mark in the film world with 2005's Man Push Cart -- takes an exacting look at what happens when homes are in foreclosure and the vultures descend, a situation that in 2007 came to be known as the subprime mortgage crisis.

The set-up: Michael Shannon plays an unscrupulous real estate hustler who has amassed a small fortune, and Andrew Garfield portrays an unemployed construction worker who's evicted from his home, but winds up working for Shannon's Rick Carver.

Set in Florida during the darkest days of the recession, the movie early on finds Carver showing up at Nash's door with a couple of sheriff's deputies. They give Nash all of two minutes to gather his belongings and move his mother (Laura Dern) and young son (Noah Lomax) out of the house.

Nash initially resists, but there's no forestalling the inevitable. The family winds up in a bad motel with few prospects for improving its lot. At this point, you can feel hope swirling down the drain.

For his part, Carver wastes no time on hope. He's too busy scheming: He works for banks, but knows how to scam the government for money. He'll also offer insultingly meager amounts of cash to take over a home for a quick flip. He calls the program "cash for keys." How about taking $3,500 for your home before the sheriff shows up?

Unlike Carver, Nash has a conscience, and Garfield does a fine job of mining Nash's uneasiness. He's in a position that's bringing in unexpected amounts of money, first as a handyman for Carver and then as a participant in evictions. He's required to push people around the way he once was pushed around, but he's never comfortable in the role.

Shannon makes Carver a credible character, a man whose ethos springs from a dog-eat-dog reading of reality. He saw his father get screwed by the system, and vowed that he'd never share such a fate. Carver isn't about to be the dog that's eaten.

Carver's a businessman who learned how to shut off his emotions so that he could capitalize on other people's suffering. An amoral pragmatist, he's willing to give Nash an opportunity to flip the script on a society that has left him out in the cold. There's no bailout for losers, Carver insists.

Bahrani's movie revolves around two conflicting notions of housing.

To Nash, the home from which he was evicted is the cornerstone of his family's stability. He grew up the house. His mother operated her haircutting businesses there, and his son knew no other residence.

Carver's view of homes couldn't be more different. To him a house is nothing but a box and an opportunity to make money. Boxes have no emotional meaning and neither do the deluded people who live in them.

Carver used to make money by selling people homes. Now he makes money by throwing them out of their houses. He understands the irony, but doesn't much care.

Garfield, the British actor who took a turn at Spider Man, does fine work as a guy who wants to earn a decent wage with his hands, but finds himself dabbling in a world where money has become the only measure that matters.

Bahrani isn't afraid of social relevance, which may be why the movie's at its best when it's showing us what life is like for people who find themselves looking at their belongings on the front lawn and not knowing where the hell to go next.

It's an important image to absorb, but when you review the story in your mind, you may realize that Bahrani is better at presenting telling incidents and episodes than he is at delivering a fully enriched narrative.

Still, 99 Homes puts us in touch with a devastating moment from which many have yet to recover -- and perhaps never will.