"Lion" is an emotionally-engaging and fascinating true story that is not to be missed.

Rating: 9/10 (31 December 2016)

We all have a family. You may live with the family of your birth, with a family which adopted you or with a family that you have made through getting married and having children. It doesn't matter which. You have a family. Since we can all relate to having family, it also follows that we can all understand what it means to be separated from family. And you can probably imagine what it would be like to have a family that is lost to you, to desperately desire a reunion, but be unable to make it happen. A person in that situation may become part of another family, even one that is full of love, but still never stop thinking of his original family. That's what the main character is facing in the Australian-produced drama "Lion" (PG-13, 1:58).
The film is based on the true story of Indian-born Australian businessman Saroo Brierley, as told in his 2014 book "A Long Way Home". As a 5-year-old, Saroo was abandoned by his older brother in a train station near his home in central India. Saroo wandered onto another train where he got locked in one of the unoccupied cars and was unable to get out until the train stopped for good in Calcutta, over 900 miles from his home. Saroo couldn't tell the authorities enough about his hometown or his family for them to help him find his way back home, so he was declared "lost" and put up for adoption. He was soon adopted by John and Sue Brierley, an upper middle class couple who lived on the southeastern Australian island of Tasmania. It was there that he grew up as a member of a happy family. When he became an adult, he began thinking more about his family in India and how they must still wonder what happened to him – and if he's even still alive – if they are still alive themselves. He began using satellite images from Google Earth to look at train stations he might have passed through 25 years earlier – and desperately hoping to match something in those images with any of the details he could still remember.
That was the bare bones of Saroo's factual story, and here's how it plays out in the film "Lion": Saroo (Sunny Pawar) is a happy 5-year-old from a poor family living in a neighborhood of the city of Khandwa, India. Saroo's mother, Kamla (Priyanka Bose), is a single parent who works moving rocks at construction sites, in order to feed Saroo, his younger sister and their teenage brother, Guddu (Abhishek Bharate). Saroo is very close to Guddu, following him everywhere. Guddu tries to help his mother by stealing and selling coal from passing trains and Saroo helps. When Guddu announces late one night that he's going to take the train to a nearby city to get temporary work moving bales of hay, Saroo convinces Guddu to let him come along. When the boys arrive at their destination and get off the train, Saroo is so tired that Guddu lays him down on a bench to sleep while Guddu goes to see about the job. Before Guddu can get back, Saroo wakes up and, looking for his brother, wanders onto another train, but gets locked inside one of the cars. This train doesn't make all of its usual stops and Saroo is unable to get off or get help.
Saroo ends up in Calcutta (now known as Kolkata), on the other side of India. Saroo is so far from home that the locals speak a different dialect than he does. Even with the help of a translator, Saroo can't tell anyone exactly where he is from and can only identify his mother as "mum". After living with other homeless children in or near the Calcutta train station for a few days and escaping some potentially dangerous situations in the city, he ends up in a center for missing children. After exhausting every effort to find where Saroo belongs, the center allows him to be adopted by Sue Brierley (Oscar winner Nicole Kidman) and her husband, John (David Wenham). John and Sue are loving parents who soon also adopt another Indian boy named Mantosh. As an adult, Saroo (now played by Dev Patel) begins a search for his original family. He doesn't want to hurt the Brierleys, but he agonizes over what the past 25 years must have been like for his Indian family, especially for his birth mother and for Guddu. As Saroo prepares for a career in hotel management, he falls in love with a classmate named Lucy (multiple Oscar nominee Rooney Mara), who is sympathetic to Saroo's emotional need to find his family, but is frustrated by Saroo's growing obsession with a search that has little chance of success. Understanding that he is looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack and is distancing himself from those closest to him, he still cannot stop searching for answers to who he is – and to find the family who loved him first.
"Lion" is a fascinating, emotional and very entertaining film. It showed more of Saroo's life in India than I would've expected and it sometimes seems like a bit much, but it's that background that gives this film its emotional heart. It's also helpful that most of the story is told chronologically, with flashbacks used only sparingly and for surprising reveals. The film's ending won't be a surprise to anyone familiar with the story, but it still makes for the most emotional 5-10 minutes in recent cinematic memory. And the last few shots and information revealed during the closing credits are both surprising and satisfying. With such an emotionally engaging story so well told and so well-acted, "Lion" is not to be missed. "A"