This week I'm looking at some storytelling takeaways from the 2021 Oscar Nominees for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Ramin Bahrani's THE WHITE TIGER, based on the novel by Aravind Adiga, starts with a horrifying moment--a young, rich, maybe drunk couple run down a little boy while they're fooling around. In the backseat our protagonist Balram watches, horrified.
This is the key moment of the film. It will set Balram down his harrowing path, and it tells us exactly what we're in for.
Except as we hear the car running over the body, the film freezes frame on Balram's shocked, somewhat silly-looking face. "Pardon me," he says in voiceover. "This is no way to start this movie. I am Indian, after all, and it is an instant and venerated custom of my people to start a story by praying to a higher power."
And just like that, the film seems to signal we're actually in the realm of Tarantino. The shocking sound of the car hitting the body plays into that; it's so awful to have heard that the idea the film might somehow be a comedy (as insane as that is from the outside; they killed a child) comes as a welcome relief. Maybe they didn't hurt that child after all. Or maybe somehow it won't matter.
The film moves on and we come to know Balram, first far in the future of the opening and then before it happened. In both cases, the story is constructed around absurdly funny kinds of ideas: in the future he's writing a letter to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, in fact his entire narration is a letter to woo Jiabao to meet Balram on his upcoming state visit to India.
Meanwhile in the past he's this skinny, put-upon poor kid who has made it his quest to become the rich master's son's driver. And he chases that dream with an infectious over the top enthusiasm that once again signals comedy, not drama.
There are beats along the way that are quite dark. He has the chance to go to school but is prevented by his controlling Grandmother. When
he gets a job with the son he immediately sets to undermining the guy above him, and ends
up using the man's religion to blackmail him into quitting.
But still, Balram is so winning that these momentary alarm bells don’t make you realize just how
fucking dark this movie is going to get.
And that's how it so happens that when we find our way back at the horrifying moment of the child being run down, and the movie becomes the story of Balram being betrayed by the people he's trusted, and how he responds, we're surprised.
In an awful moment, if you give the audience a chance to look away or feel something else--if you give them an escape--they will take it.
Knowing that gives you another way to surprise them.
Takeaway Question: What's the story I'm telling? And what's the story I want the audience to think I'm telling?
