Alone and desperate on the streets of Calcutta

Rating: 10/10 (26 December 2016)

Lion (2016) was directed by Garth Davis. It's a coming of age story, but the story it tells is not one that you'll see in many movies. (I'm sure you could see stories like it every day in Calcutta, but those stories don't usually come to the screen.)
Sunny Pawar plays the protagonist, Saroo, as a child. By bad luck, Saroo is locked inside a railway car at a station near his home. When he gets out of the train he's in Calcutta. He's trapped in a totally different world--urban rather than rural--and a different culture--people speak Bengali and not Hindi. By utilizing ingenuity and intelligence, Saroo manages to survive. Ultimately he's placed in an orphanage, and adopted by an Australian couple, John and Sue Brierley (David Wenham and Nicole Kidman). Wenham and Kidman both do a fine job, in roles that don't really use their talents fully.
Saroo is portrayed by Dev Patel as a young adult. He has done very well in the home of the Brierley family, but he can't forget that he had a home and a family in India. The remainder of the plot follows from there.
To a certain extent, Lion has been billed as a love story between Patel and Rooney Mara, who portrays his girlfriend, Lucy. Rooney Mara is adorable, but she's not the co-star. I think the love story between the two of them is a fairly awkward plot device. Mara has two expressions--loving and happy, and loving and sad.
The real stars of the film are Sunny Pawar and Dev Patel. You really believe in both of their characters, and you can see how the young Saroo could have become the young adult Saroo. Both of them portray their roles brilliantly, and the movie would be worth seeing just to watch them act. (It's a bright, colorful, noisy movie, but it's not costumes, or cinematography, or hundreds of extras that make this film work. It's the acting of Pawar and Patel.)
This movie will be better watched in a theater than on the small screen, because of the vast expanses of scenery in all of the locations. We saw this movie at the excellent Little Theatre in Rochester, NY. On Christmas/Chanukah day, 2016, the Little Theatre showed Lion, Fences, Manchester by the Sea, and Jackie. What other theater in New York Skate could match that combination?