Good, but should have been better

Rating: 7/10 (15 May 2018)

From a poor rural Indian family, 5-year old Saroo ends up in Calcutta, over 1,000 miles from home. Unable to explain where he comes from, he is ultimately adopted by an Australian family. Still troubled by the memories of his first family, the invention of GoogleEarth enables him to look for the childhood home he lost
This is a great, great story, and I really wanted to like this film rather more than I did.
There is a lot which is good about it. Dev Patel as adult Saroo is excellent, Nicole Kidman and David Wenham are both good as his adoptive Australian parents - I had to put to one side my feeling that they are the "go to" Australians for these sort of parts in recognition of box-office clout - and Sunny Pawar as young Saroo is also very good. So the performances work.
The location work, both in India and Australia is also good although, again I had to put a lid on a strong feeling that I had only recently seen Indian youngsters suffering hard times in slums in Slumdog Millionaire.
But two things meant that this film was not the success for me which I had hoped it would be. One was the fact that I think it would have worked much better as a dramatisation than an adaptation - if the narrative had not featured Saroo's fellow adoptee, his troubled "brother" Mantosh, or his American girlfriend Lucy, both of whom were major obstructions to the narrative flow without having any dramatic purpose (other than that they actually existed), the film wouldn't have felt quite so bumpy.
And the other thing is that much of it took far too long to make its point or, having made it, lingered far too long before moving on. I understood the purpose of showing us the enormity of 5-year old Saroo vs Calcutta - how huge, how daunting, how terrifying for a small child. But I think the audience - or this member of it, at any rate - got the point a good 10 minutes before it stopped being shown. Ditto the train journey to Calcutta. Ditto Saroo moping around Melbourne.
The film is 2 hours long, and would have been a much more involving experience at half an hour less.
I wouldn't discourage anyone from seeing it - the final sequence is worth seeing on its own - but, for me, it was a worthy effort which didn't quite succeed.