Lion
Director: Garth Davis
Stars: Dev Patel, Nicole Kidman, Rooney Mara, David Wenham, Priyanka Bose
Four and a half stars
There are two ways to look at Lion. One is as a heart-warming tale of love beyond boundaries and the incandescent pull of home. A more cynical view is seeing it as a two-hour advertisement for Google Earth.
Let us not be cynical – enjoy this poignant, true story of a man who became separated from his family in India at age 5, was adopted by an Australian couple then set out to find his family 25 years later.
Lion is really two beautifully shot films – the tenacious story of young Saroo Brierley, lost far from home, and the less dramatic, slightly forced, story of him all grown up and looking for his past.
Dev Patel, of Slumdog Millionaire fame, stars as the older Saroo and proves he is a talented, striking leading man – but even he would admit he is delightfully overshadowed by newcomer Sunny Pawar, who plays his 5-year-old self with irrepressible sweetness.
“I can lift anything,” he says at one point – and proves it by lifting this film.
The screenplay by Luke Davies, adapted from Brierley's memoir A Long Way Home, starts in 1986 with the young Saroo falling asleep on a train that takes him 1,600 kilometres. Lost, hungry and scared, he cannot get help since he speaks Hindi and ends up in an area where Bengali is the most common language. After a series of ordeals, he is taken to an orphanage that resembles a prison. It's a grim journey and the camera does not shy away from gritty places and forgotten people.
Salvation comes in the form of Nicole Kidman and David Wenham, who play the couple who adopt him. Kidman turns in a very unglamorous, quiet and meditative performance.
Director Garth Davis has us in the palm of his hand at this point, but the second half of the film slackens somewhat.
Patel is great as a haunted man but he has less to work with than his younger version. If the first half is a compelling, physical journey, the second is a voyage inside the mind, and the film degenerates into long moments showing Saroo’s solitary wanderings and sleeplessness.
Soon, he is pushing away his girlfriend (the marvellous Rooney Mara) and studying online maps of India from a certain internet company, tracing railway lines.
Fragmented memories gradually return and he starts to put together the pieces of his past, thanks to the power of love, tenacity – and Google.
artslife@thenational.ae
