Lion is such a highly emotional true life story about a 5 year boy who is accidentally separated from his family, is shipped overseas, but still never forgets his family, that it simply cannot fail to tug at the heartstrings of even the most cynical audience. Writer Luke Davies and director Garth Davis have deliberately vamped up the sentimentally factor of this totally charming tale which will in fact have you alternating between grabbing the kleenex and cheering with joy.
Five year old Saroo (Sunny Pawar) lives with his poverty stricken family in a remote village in India. His uneducated single-parent mother works as a laborer, and Guddu his older brother who he idolizes, scavenges for coal to exchange for milk or food. One night Saroo persuades Guddu to let him join in scrambling around on trains looking for anything that may have been dropped/lost by travelers, but halfway through the night Saroo is so tired that he begs to be allowed to sleep. Left on a bench on the station platform whilst Guddu goes off on his hunt, the 5 year old then wakes up a couple of hours later feeling lost and confused.
He takes refuge in a train standing in the station and immediately falls asleep only to wake up later to discover that the train is now moving and racing through the countryside. What he doesn’t realize is that as the train is going to be decommissioned it is not going to stop until it reaches its final destination which is over 3000 miles away in Calcutta, India’s third largest city.
Getting off the train at last, Saroo cannot even speak the local language (Bengali as opposed to his native Hindi) and although the poor kid is totally on his own and has to scavenge for food and water, he is for one so very young has natural street smarts. He ducks and dives through the underbelly of the city, sleeping rough in tunnels, having a couple of near misses with unscrupulous adults, and even steals fruit from a Holy shrine, until he is finally caught by the Authorities and sent to an orphanage which is run like a Prison.
Unable to identify either the name of his village or family to the Social Worker, Saroo ends up being adopted and is shipped off on a plane to meet his new family in Australia.
The action then fast forwards 20 years and Saroo (Dev Patel) is now a well adjusted and happy Australian who is about to leave home and go to Melbourne to University to study hotel management. He adores his parents, particularly his mother Sue (Nicole Kidman in the most unflattering clothes and a shocking red wig) which is in great contrast to Mantosh another Indian boy they adopted who had enormous emotional problems.
As Saroo starts befriending some of his University classmates, a casual enquiry about his heritage suddenly starts him obsessing about what ever happened to his birth family. Almost overnight he rapidly changes from being a happy outgoing student to one who is now possessed about locating his past which doesn’t seem to have ever been of any consequence for the past two decades. It is one of the two misfires in this otherwise perfect story. The other is when Saroo is being so consumed with all the workings 0f Google Earth and as that scenes goes on for far too long, it makes one feel that we are actually watching an extended advertisement for their software.
However, before Saroo can hop on plane back to India and see if his search will come to fruition, he has to make good with his family after his rather anti-social and erratic behavior. His understanding college girlfriend Lucy (Rooney Mara) is soon won over, and so too is his mother which gives her a chance to explain why she adopted him in the first place giving Kidman a scene-stealing speech which instantly reminds one of what a superb actress she is.
Patel as the adult Saroo has developed, both physically and as
an actor, since he first burst on to our screens in Slumdog Millionaire just eight years ago, and once again he gives yet another fine performance. However no matter how good he is, the movie undoubtedly belongs to young Sunny Pawar plucked from obscurity out of the thousands of kids who were considered for the role, to give this wide-eyed totally enchanting performance that has you glued to screen panicking about him having to face such a daunting hostile world alone. He alone is worth the price of admission.
Even if you are aware of the real story that the movie is based upon and are not surprised by it’s outcome, it is handled so beautifully it will have you grabbing for that box of Kleenex yet once again. It is such a pity that not all crowd-pleasing feel-good movies are as captivating as this, and this is certainly one of the best of the genre this year.
Labels: 2016, drama, dramatized reallife
