The lost child

Rating: 7/10 (28 January 2017)

Lion is a film of two halves. It starts with the story of 5 year old Saroo in India who with his older brother Guddu tries to make ends meet for his mother by stealing coal from train trucks.
One day Saroo pesters his brother to take him to work some distance from their home but Saroo gets tired and falls asleep on a train and ends up in Calcutta, hundreds of miles away from his village. Unable to speak Bengali, unsure of where he is from, his mother's name, he survives with other street children and fend of sexual predators. Saroo is then placed in an orphanage before he is adopted by a well to do Australian couple.
In Australia the now grown up Saroo (Dev Patel) haunted by visions of his brother and mother searching for him starts to search for his family, home and identity. The search becomes an obsession, he gives up his job, becomes distant from his adopted parents as he goes through Google Earth looking for clues based on vague childhood memories.
Director Garth Davis made the underwhelming television series Top of the Lake in 2013. Here he has a surer touch, maybe because he has a better and more coherent screenplay.
The second half of the film is not as strong or powerful as the first half, even clunky in places. Saroo's other adopted brother has emotional problems, it his hinted in the film that some of the kids in the orphanage might had been sexually abused but we never find out why Saroo's adopted brother is the way he is.
However the film is well paced and we see the contrast from the tumultuous scenes in India to the more tranquil scenes in Tasmania.