Lion – 2016
I went into this film knowing only that it starred Dev Patel, an actor who is always a pleasure to watch. He is consistently good in every film in which I have ever seen him. That being said, he is only in about half the film. The first half is about the main character as a child, and the second half is about him as a young adult. It was based on a true story, making the drama all the more compelling, and it had an incredibly touching ending.
The movie tells the story of a five year old child named Saroo in Khandwa, India, wonderfully played by Sunny Pawar, who is tragically lost. He isn’t abducted, but through his brother’s poor choices, he ends up trapped on a train that takes him across the wide country and deposits him on the streets of Calcutta. The boy is too young to know his mother’s actual name, or that of the tiny district in which he lived. But even if he had, he would still have been lost. His limited ability to speak was only in the Hindi language, and in Calcutta, the people speak Bengali. So there he was, a five-year-old, alone on the streets of a strange city and he can’t even ask for help, and because there are already so many homeless children living on the streets, he is just one among hundreds.
Saroo is eventually picked up by police who put him in an overcrowded state-run orphanage and adopted by a couple living in Australia. Sue Brierley, played by Nicole Kidman, and her husband John played by David Wenham are the perfect parents. They love him dearly, and take him to their home in Hobart, Tasmania. Eventually, the adopt a second Indian child named Mantosh, played by Keshav Jadhav, who turns out to have a mental disability, causing him to go into fits of rage and self-injury.
Twenty years later, the adult Saroo, played so well by Dev Patel, is moving to Melbourne for schooling. While there he meets Lucy, an American Student played by Rooney Mara, and the two begin dating. But while at the home of some of his Indian friends, Saroo is reminded of his childhood. His friend suggests using Google Earth to search for the place from which he had come. But once he begins, he becomes so obsessed with the impossible search that he quits his job and his schooling, and distances himself from Lucy. He ignores his family and barely seems to even care for his own needs.
But the search is fruitless. He tries to calculate a workable search radius using his sketchy memories of how much time he’d spent trapped on the train, and the landmarks he had seen through the window as the train had sped to its destination. He begins to give up hope, but when he tries looking outside his search radius, he recognizes the rock quarry where his mother had worked, and from there, he quickly finds his home. He reconciles with his family and Lucy, and makes the journey to Ganesh Talai. There he finds and has a tearful reunion with his birth-mother and sister. He breaks down in tears when he learns that his brother, Guddu, had actually died the night he had gotten on the empty train.
The acting was very good, the directing was perfect, and the sweet ending easily brought tears to my eyes. So often, nowadays, movies based on true stories really focus on the tragedy and not enough on the happy resolution. But director Garth Davis really did a great job of giving us that incredibly joyous ending. Not only does Saroo find his mother, played by Priyanka Bose, but she, who had never given up hope, finds her lost son. And to make it even more powerful, before the credits began to roll, images of the real Saroo and both of his biological and adoptive mothers meeting and hugging really pulled at my heartstrings.
I have very few negative things to say about the film. For me, the biggest thing is pretty minor. The first half of the movie really sucked you in and made you care about the unfortunate boy on the streets of a foreign city. It was well-paced and consistently engaging. But the second half of the film really didn’t have very much story content. It seemed like the screenwriter, Luke Davies, did his best to stretch it out, and we start getting all these little sub-plots that didn’t have much to do with Saroo’s quest to locate his home. For example, his strained relationship with Mantosh and their reconciliation was sweet, but ultimately a little superfluous.
There was one scene in particular that I really liked, and that was the one in which the adult Saroo goes to Sue to confess to her his search. He had shut her out, afraid that she might think him ungrateful because he was looking for his lost family. During their conversation, he says that he is sorry that she was not able to have her own children. I really liked her response. She says that she could have had children, but she and her husband chose to adopt instead. She tells him that they were in agreement that the world already had too many children, and that by adopting, they could help a few of the lost ones. It was another sweet moment of reconciliation and understanding in which both Kidman and Patel did a great job. And on the whole, it was a film that was well worth watching.