Patel brings ‘Lion’ home
Knowing the ending in advance is usually considered detrimental to effective filmmaking, but a smart director and screenwriter can use foreknowledge to their advantage, if they work it right.
The first half of the film is short on dialogue, but eloquent in storytelling as a young Indian boy named Saroo (Sunny Pawar) gets separated from his older brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate) one night, winds up on a decommissioned train and ends up a thousand miles from home in Kolkata (Calcutta).
Unable to communicate with others because most people in the teeming city speak Bengali and he only speaks Hindi, Saroo wanders the streets and somehow survives on his own until he’s rescued, sent to an orphanage and adopted by an Australian couple named John and Sue Brierley (David Wenham and Nicole Kidman).
Davis relies heavily on Greig Fraser’s cinematography to tell the story at this point — a whirl of golden butterflies circle Saroo in the opening scene, then the world becomes dark, soot-filled and misty as he looks desperately and in vain from the windows of the speeding train for some familiar landmark.
Young Pawar handles his scant dialogue well enough, but we focus on his face and especially his enormous, expressive eyes to tell us about Saroo’s confused feelings of anxiety and curiosity in a strange new world.
[...] Saroo is studying hotel management, beginning a relationship with a fellow student named Lucy (Rooney Mara) and considering the Brierleys the only mum and dad he’s ever known.
Where Davis and Davies were able to achieve sweep and dimension in Saroo’s initial separation from his mother and brother, now they rely on series of quick, underdeveloped scenes that may momentarily capture our curiosity but are so fleeting, we can’t really invest in anything except Saroo’s determination to find out how he became lost all those years before.
Ill-served as he is by the dialogue, he still makes Saroo credible and heartbreaking, even as the character touches the edge of madness in his desperation to get home again.