An unchallenging story

Rating: 7/10 (19 February 2017)

"Did you mean 'Ganesh Talai'?"
Watching the Internet on the big screen makes my skin crawl. Watching someone use Google Earth on the big screen made my skin crawl. After 25 years of searching, it only took a little outside- the-box thinking, or rather, beyond an assumed radius, to find home.
Don't get me wrong, Lion is a good movie and uplifting. You see, 80,000 children go missing in India every year, and thanks to some rich white people, a couple of them occasionally get back home to their squalid existence. Nicole Kidman channels her inner Johnny Depp and delivers a performance that is part love, part psychopath. They adopt two lost children. The good one, who is also well adjusted considering what he's gone through, is better looking than the other, the mentally disturbed one who likes to hurt himself.
What is home? Where do you belong? Is home posh Tasmanian boat life? Is it in a shack with straw and goats? What is the dollar amount you can spend on happiness versus the bare essentials of life? Does anyone care about you? Does society care about others?
The answers do not lie withing Lion. It's little more than the story of a boy who gets home after 25 years, and it never spends more than a fleeting glance on the underlying issues of the billions of poor people in the world who don't have any meaningful chance to climb an economic ladder.