Intelligent and moving

Rating: 7/10 (7 February 2017)

"Lion" is the kind of inspirational movie I normally shy away from but first-time director Garth Davis treats the material with a harder edge than I expected. The potential for sentimentality is, of course, high in this true story of a five year old Indian boy separated from his family by 1600 kilometers when the train he is sleeping in 'accidentally' takes him to Calcutta forcing him to live on the streets until a kindly Australian couple, (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham), adopt him and raise him to adulthood in Tasmania.
As a child he is played by the remarkable Sunny Pawar and as an adult by the equally remarkable Dev Patel in a film full of fine performances. The tragedy of the early scenes are that they will immediately remind you of Dickensian London, (complete with a Fagin and a Nancy), though mercifully these children encounter as much goodness as they do evil. This is, after all, a film about hope.
Of course, one of the risks involved when Western filmmakers make movies in such 'exotic' locations as India is the temptation to prettify them out of all recognition. This is fine in a movie like "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" but a movie like this needs to look at least more 'realistic' and Greig Fraser's excellent cinematography does go some way to rectifying the problem; there is a darkness here, literally and metaphorically. Ultimately this is a moving and intelligent picture that could easily have been so much less; a film in which even the obligatory romantic entanglements, (here involving a fine Rooney Mara), work. Hardly Best Picture material but worth seeing nevertheless.