Lion

Rating: 8/10 (27 December 2016)

"Lion" is the touching and heartfelt true story of a five-year old Indian boy named Saroo Brierley who gets lost and far from his family, eventually being adopted by Australian parents. Twenty years after this incident, Saroo becomes determined to find his mother, brother, and sister, despite the lack of information that he has. The film is pretty much a perfectly executed feel good movie. It is a deeply human film that pretty much anyone can connect to.
What really made this film so good is that it is consistently from the point of view of Saroo. It is a pretty tightly constructed film. The first scenes of the film establish the strong relationship he has with his family, and what surprised me about this movie is that the entire first half is focused on Saroo being lost as a child. The child actor performs incredibly well, and the film simply wouldn't be nearly as emotionally involving without his performance. Since the film is from his point of view, all of the big, scary things that happen to him while he is lost that he doesn't quite understand are not directly explained. One night, while Saroo is sleeping with other children in a train station, he is forced to move because men suddenly appear and begin to physically drag the children away, against their will. Saroo, of course, just runs, and their is never a mention or explanation for it, because Saroo himself doesn't understand it. As a result, the audience member is along for the same ride that Saroo is, and that allows us to feel more emotionally connected to him throughout the story.
While Saroo eventually gets two loving Australian parents, he still has troubles in the form of his emotionally challenged adopted brother, and when the film cuts to 20 years later, his brother seems to have nearly disappeared from his life. Now that Saroo is 25, he is going to college, and he soon gets a girlfriend, but after being reminded of his real family and telling his story to his friends, he can't seem to shake the feeling that he needs to find his family, and that becomes his main goal. In fact, he begins to become obsessed with that goal. He has frequent and sudden flashes of memory of his town and his childhood, and this is almost all he can go from, besides the train station he ended up at after getting lost. His obsession pretty much puts all of his relationships on hiatus for years, and although he seems determined to find his real family, he completely forgets about his adopted family, and because of his reclusive behavior his mother feels as if she is losing her children. Nicole Kidman delivers a great performance as Saroo's mother and an emotional monologue describing this. Why Saroo decides not to tell his mother that he quit his job to look for his family remains a mystery to me, but perhaps it is because he didn't want to make her feel unwanted, or build up expectations and then never actually find them.
What eventually happens is that those flashes of memory that Saroo has of his hometown that also gave us a deeper emotional connection for him and his family also end up leading him to his home because of recognition of a certain spot on google maps that he then traces to his house. His actual visit to his hometown after over 25 years is one of the most emotionally involving scenes of the year, considering we as the audience have been through this rough journey with him. When Saroo walks through certain spots that both the audience and Saroo recognize from his memories, we share the anticipation of the main character. That means we also share his frustration, then relief, then sadness, and ultimately his overwhelming sense of joy. The music in these scenes also adds to their emotional impact.