LION Review
From director Garth Davis (in his feature film debut), LION is an able depiction of a journey that is as miraculous as it is emotionally investing. At least in regards to the actual real life of Saroo Brierley, whose life was upended by a tragic separation and later, thanks to the help of Google Maps, beautifully reunited with what was lost. Davis’ film is one of two visible halves surrounding one life, with one particular moment holding stronger emotional weight than the other.
In the film’s stronger first half, we follow the young Saroo (played by five-year-old newcomer Sunny Pawar) and his family living a life full of hard work and love in Khandwa, India circa 1986. As Saroo and his doting older brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate) scramble around town, doing what they can to support their single mother (Priyanka Bose) and their baby sister, the two brothers, looking to work in the fields, soon become separated at a busy train station where Saroo hastily hops on a decommissioned train that takes the young child 1,000 miles away from his home and family. From there, Davis takes a rather gritty look at the young Saroo’s harrowing journey as the boy lives on the streets, avoids child kidnappers (I think?), and eventually, is sent off to a ramshackle orphanage that has more stranded kids than financial support. Indeed, for a film that will soon introduce the talented Dev Patel, Rooney Mara, and Nicole Kidman (to name a few), the young Mr. Pawar makes the biggest impression in the entirety of this film. At just the tender age of five, Mr. Pawar brings surprising authenticity to his wrenching role, visualizing the toll of such a journey on such a young life. At his support, Davis and and crew bring a stark naturalness to young Saroo’s journey, utilizing the genuinely dramatic score of Hauschka and Dustin O’ Halloran (which transitions from suspenseful to stirring as the film goes on) and the on-the-ground camerawork of Greg Fraser to vividly depict a boy lost among millions of people and the unlimited sights and sounds and danger they bring.
But this turbulent beginning half of the film is just the start of Saroo’s journey. Eventually, the young boy is adopted by the Brierley’s (played by Nicole Kidman and David Wenham, respectively), a caring Australian couple living in Tasmania who also adopt another Indian boy, Mantosh (played in youth by Keshav Jadhav and in adulthood by Divian Ladwa), a boy with volatile emotions whose relationship with Saroo is woefully underdeveloped. The story then jumps some twenty years to catch up with a now adult Saroo (played by Dev Patel) embarking on a career in hotel hospitality in Melbourne, where he soon finds love in the form of Lucy (Rooney Mara). This adult Saroo is confident and educated, long whisked away from those days as a child left to the mercy of the streets of India; but still, the memories of his blood family gnaw at the young man, who can’t seem to find a connection with his caring adoptive family or his new love, as each party is unable to bring closure to a Saroo’s tragic past. Obsessively, the young man turns to Google Maps — which becomes the film’s second hero of sorts in a feat of movie advertising that is both narratively necessary and visually prevalent — which allows him to retrace the steps from his past on a quest to find his long lost family.
At nearly the hour mark, this mission of familial reconnection takes center stage and while the situation itself is more than capable of bringing out the tears and cheers, LION nonetheless feels a little lighter emotionally in this half. Mr. Patel, taking the baton from his younger co-star, does solid work here as a grown man lost among the seas of doubt and identity crises, but Luke Davies’ script (which was adapted from the real-life Brierley’s book “A Long Way Home”) can’t find enough time to make the adult Saroo’s journey as emotionally investing as the previous half. Maybe it’s due to a second half that crams dialogue that regurgitates events we’ve already seen, which stands in contrast to a first half that utilized setting and tone and atmosphere above words to create a complete picture, or maybe Davis and Davies simply don’t have enough time to let the emotions seep deeper in their story that quickly begins to tie up its ends. Whatever the case, LION shuttles through the adult Saroo’s emotional and psychological hang-ups, at points sidelining Mara’s consistently concerned girlfriend and Kidman’s increasingly worried mother to single notes of characterization, towards an ending that leaves the audience wanting more in regards to Saroo and his connection with his real life family despite a pretty emotionally rewarding titular reveal. In a way, this “flaw” speaks more to the sheer extraordinariness of the real life Saroo, a life filled with so much twists and turns that any medium would find it hard to capture the roiling emotions and shifting moods of its central protagonist and his relationships with family both blood and adoptive.
From that viewing, LION is a capable film that delivers a once-in-a-lifetime journey through the lens of a pretty straightforward affair. In an interesting case, the film embarks on its own two-halved journey: one that vividly brings to life the struggle of a young child and the other that, in workmanlike fashion, simply relays the rest of that child’s journey. On those terms, LION is majestic in appearance but by the end, offers the plainest of roars.
3/5
