Surprisingly Hollow

Rating: 7/10 (1 January 2017)

Born in rural destitution, the 5-year-old Saroo followed his older brother to the local railway station one night. He fell asleep in a train car, and woke up 900 miles away edging towards the bustling city of Calcutta. After weeks of scavenging for scraps near the rails, Saroo was brought to a center for abandoned children and quickly adopted by a an Australian couple who raised and took care of him for 25 years.
Lion's Dickensian tale of a displaced child who is adopted, brought to a faraway land and decides to trek back in search of his real family, is all the more harrowing when you consider the whole thing is a true story. While Saroo's "A Long Way Home" never really caught fire in the west until, well until just now, the story was all the rage back in India and Australia. In addition to being a challenging but ultimately heartwarming story of loss, reunion and renewal, the tale also works as a rallying cry, by drawing attention to India's indignant, indifferent and sometimes predatory policies towards impoverished children.
Yet despite the story's obvious appeal and the anchored authority of it being true, there's still something about Lion that rings a hollow note. Part of might have something to do with director Garth Davis's approach to the material. As a fairly green feature length director, Davis injects the screen with liberal amounts of stylistic bravado, as if to show the audience what he as a storyteller can do. He uses a host of not just visual motifs but story devices to achieve his ends including prolonged fever dreams of the older Saroo (Patel), struggling with the penumbras of his young brother Guddu (Bharate) desperately searching for him. This of course is all set to a score that plucks on the heart strings like the licks of a wistful sitar.
It's dapper film work to be sure, but it does surprisingly little as world building technique. That problem that is compounded when the young Saroo (Pawar) travels to Australia to meet his new parents (Kidman and Wenham). The camera likes to doddle on Saroo gingerly touching a TV for the first time and seeing a full fridge for the first time and ignores the multitude of micro-expressions that the cast is trying convey. At many points Lion felt less like a movie about people than about moving parts.
The best parts of the film are the parts that feel the most honest. The scenes involving the budding courtship of college-aged Saroo and Lucy (Mara), all have a certain giddiness to them. On the opposite side of the emotional spectrum, Nawazuddin Siddiqui's minor role is so effectively creepy that you almost forget he's one of the most recognizable pacesetters in modern Bollywood. There is also a quiet scene in a classmates kitchen where for the first time as an adult, Saroo realizes there is something dolefully missing from his bourgeois life. It is at that moment Patel truly shows he's got a range that few movies would allow him to exercise.
Yet every time Dev Patel, Nicole Kidman and Rooney Mara transcend to do some of their most compelling work, we're once again distracted by the shorthand version of truly effective film making. Sadly at these moments, you become aware that you're not watching the best version of this story but merely an inauthentic distillation. A white dude's version, of a white dude's script adapted for white people looking for the same high they got watching Slumdog Millionaire (2008).
Unfortunately Lion leaves a little too much to be desired as a cinematic experience. It dances frustratingly close to the edge of being not just good but great, but ultimately leans on cliché and hackneyed movie-of-the-week dramatics to pull its story through. Those inclined to see Lion, should definitely wait through the credits. Surprisingly you get more of an emotional payoff watching the Brierley family home videos than you do watching everything else.