Back to the roots

Rating: 6/10 (28 February 2017)

"Lion" is a co-production between Australia, the UK and the United States from 2016. It is predominantly in the English language, but due to a big part of the film taking place in India, there are also Bengali and Hindi parts. When it does not take place in India, the action moves to Australia. This is also why I am a bit surprised that this movie garnered so much awards attention this year. It was certainly one of the big players and the biggest successes were probably BAFTA wins for Dev Patel and Luke Davies as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Picture (along with several others). This 2-hour movie is the story of Saroo, a little Indian boy who loses (on a tragic day for his family) contact to his brother and ends up getting adopted in the probably best possible outcome for him by an Australian family. 2 decades later, he sets out to find his real family back in India. Human connection (his girlfriend played by Rooney Mara) and advanced technology, i.e. Google Earth, help him with this challenging endeavor.
This is the movie that turns Dev Patel probably into a Hollywood star. Sure he has been the lead in Best Picture winner "Slumdog Millionaire" before and he has appeared in high-profile projects like "The Newsroom", but with this performance we see here, he really breaks free. I personally would say that it is not an Oscar-worthy performance, but he is deserving of the nomination. Of course, he is lead and not supporting. He is the central character of the film and it is entirely irrelevant hat he did not appear in it during the first 45 minutes. His physical appearance is so different from his previous work and it is also very much in tone with the film's title here. His wild mane somehow justifies it and alone by the name revelation at the very end, I may not have approved. Anyway, I do believe there is an occasional weakness here and there. For example, the long part early on with the child actor had some lengths and I believe they could have kept this at 30 minutes max without really losing any crucial substance. Or the talk of Kidman's character about the young dark-skinned boy she (thought she) saw as a child is a bit melodramatic and pretentious.
Then again I can't really blame the screenplay writer here as these parts probably were also part of the autobiographical book by Saroo Brierley and the fact that it is all based on actual events (maybe slightly dramatized) is the film's biggest strength for sure. It all (or most of it) happened this way, which makes it really easier to feel with the characters. There weren't too many moments in which the film did not feel authentic and you could forget these pretty quickly, for example how he randomly found his family's village in the gigantic country of India, even if he had the radius as a help, was pretty unrealistic. Anyway, I think the moment Patel enters the film, it all gets a lot better. Everything before that is basically like a poor man's version of the childhood parts from "Slumdog Millionaire". Patel has a commanding presence and he carried the film nicely on his shoulders with the help of Nicole Kidman (liked her more here than I usually do) and Rooney Mara, who also deserved awards recognition. Maybe not an Oscar nomination, but more than she got. David Wenham was sadly a bit underwritten and could have gotten more screen time too. I guess it was intentional to make Kidman stand out more.
As a whole, I believe this was a good film that got better and better the longer it went, which is quite a success for this runtime. I still would not count it among the very best of the year on my personal list. Somehow I felt that eventually the longing for home and the emotional moments did not turn out as effective as they could have and this is a bit of the pity. Still on a more positive note, the movie definitely had more moments and sequences that I liked than the ones I disliked or found entirely forgettable and that's always a success and an achievement. For example, I also really liked the parts about his new brother as they added a completely new interesting conflict to the entire film and showed us that it is not all about harmony and sanity in the family and that they all (the Indian kids) have their wounds from what happened to them when they were very young. Life for an Indian kid in the slums, especially if they are homeless, is a living hell to this day. Another thumbs-up for the message at the very end as these people really do need help. I recommend "Lion". It's a quality film and the director, Emmy nominee Garth Davis, certainly shows that he is not only a force to reckon with when it comes to small screen projects.