Google Earth is an unlikely saviour to wonderful characters

Rating: 8/10 (21 January 2017)

This film tells a convincingly true story of how a five year old Indian boy, adopted to Tasmanian parents, found his original village and birth mother some twenty five years later, via Google Earth. (Tasmania is the picturesque mountainous south eastern island state of Australia, which commonly gets left off maps of our country).
Dev Patel as the older Saroo shines again and Sunny Pawar as the five year old Saroo is just wonderful.
Yet another piece of evidence that fact can be stranger than fiction, I found this film intensely engaging once the initial set up was completed. The initial third of the film did seem slow, but the later structure of the story justifies this.
The landscape and city photography and locations chosen in India, Hobart, country Tasmania and Melbourne are wonderfully evocative of these places – well they are of the Australian ones, and the Indian ones seem just as good.
Nicole Kidman as the adoptive mother is a standout, and David Wenham makes the most of minor opportunities. Rooney Mara feels at home as the older Saroo's girlfriend. Australian audiences might recognise Todd Sampson in a brief but convincing role as a vocational training school principal.
The strength of the movie is in the characters, and the parts of their lives the story tells. The concluding photos of the people on whose story the film was based provides evidence of the veracity of the factual base of the story, and the effort the producers have made to present an accurate portrayal.
If you like films that are based on characters, their lives, how they unfold and locations, this may well be a standout.