Lion (2016)

Lion (2016)

IMDB rating  7.8/10

Director: Garth Davis

Writers: Saroo Brierley (adapted from the book "A Long Way Home" by), Luke Davies (screenplay)

Stars: Dev Patel, Nicole Kidman, Rooney Mara

PG-13 | 1h 58min | Drama

Storyline

A five-year-old Indian boy gets lost on the streets of Calcutta, thousands of kilometers from home. He survives many challenges before being adopted by a couple in Australia; 25 years later, he sets out to find his lost family

IMDB link Here

A tremendously moving performance from Dev Patel is the resilient soul of Lion, the incredible true story of Saroo Brierley and his tenacious quest to find the family from whom he was separated 25 years earlier. But the role is made even more affecting by its through line from the equally indelible work of Sunny Pawar, the remarkable young actor who plays him at age five in the film's wrenching opening chapter. Garth Davis, who comes from a background in commercials and co-directed the lauded drama series Top of the Lake with Jane Campion, has chosen wisely for his first feature project.

Platforming in Los Angeles and New York on Nov. 25 before its national rollout, the Weinstein Co. release should find a very warm embrace from discerning audiences. It's that relatively rare breed — a classy crowdpleaser.

Comparisons no doubt will be made with the film that launched Patel's career, Slumdog Millionaire, and the early sections of this sprawling drama do in fact recall the Dickensian depiction of life for poor children in India in Danny Boyle's 2009 Oscar winner. But that movie was an exhilarating, high-energy fairy tale, while Lion is something quite different — a sober and yet profoundly stirring contemplation of family, roots, identity and home, which engrosses throughout the course of its two-hour running time.

Luke Davies' admirably measured screenplay, adapted from Brierley's memoir A Long Way Home, brings the innocent gaze of a child to its most harrowing episodes, and then later, the hard-won maturity of a young man who has struggled to know himself despite being grateful for the life he has been given. Onscreen text at the end of the movie reveals that 80,000 children go missing in India every year, and the knowledge that Saroo's experiences make him one of the luckier ones gives the conclusion enormous resonance.

Eschewing the overused convention of an adult framing device, the filmmakers begin in 1986, plunging us into the world of five-year-old Saroo. His mother (Priyanka Bose) works as a laborer, hauling rocks, while he and his adored older brother, Guddu (Abhishek Bharate), supplement the poor family's meager existence any way they can. The delightful Pawar, an absolute screen natural, makes Saroo a happy kid eager to prove his strength by doing anything his brother can do. But they get separated when they go off looking for work. The panicked Saroo climbs aboard a decommissioned train, falls asleep and wakes up to find it moving, taking him 1,600 kilometers away to Calcutta.

Both in India and later when the action shifts to the Australian island state of Tasmania, cinematographer Greig Frasier frames the magnificent landscapes in all their ruggedness and beauty. Aerial shooting throughout the movie is spectacular. But what's most striking in the story's establishing sections is the sense of Saroo as a tiny speck against a massive, unfamiliar world, teeming with people. His isolation is intensified by the communication challenge of speaking only Hindi in an area where Bengali is the common language.

Covering the months when Saroo manages to survive alone in Calcutta, scrounging for food and narrowly escaping child abductors before being taken to an orphanage, Davies' screenplay shows the extreme vulnerability of children and the cunning of those who prey on them by presenting themselves as rescuers. The script also is effective in suggesting how the boy was so confused and worn down by the selective information being fed him that he gave up on ever finding his mother. This is heartbreaking stuff, its impact deepened by the elegant symphonic score by Dustin O'Halloran and Hausckha.

The filmmakers' ability to put us inside the head of a five-year-old boy is uncanny also in the tender scenes of his arrival in 1987 in Australia, at the home of his warm adoptive parents Sue and John Brierley (Nicole Kidman, David Wenham, both superb). Just watching Saroo encounter such things as a television or a refrigerator for the first time is magical.

Skipping forward 20 years, Patel steps in as Saroo (nailing the Australian accent). He has been a source of great pride and happiness to the Brierleys, while their second adopted son, Mantosh (Divian Ladwa), was too traumatized by the experiences of his early life ever to adjust. The script's perceptive grasp of character, the director's sensitivity to the material and the very fine work of the actors make these family scenes quite poignant, with some beautiful moments from Kidman in particular, in a deglamorized role that makes expert use of her emotional transparency.

When Saroo goes off to Melbourne to study hotel management, he meets American transplant Lucy (Rooney Mara) and a romance develops. But no less significant is his meeting, through her, of some Indian friends who ask about his background and plant the idea of tracing his roots by using newly available Google Earth technology. That process involves painstaking research around the minimal concrete information he can remember, while narrowing down the possible radius and retracing in reverse the train journey that took him to Calcutta.

Patel does arguably his most nuanced and heartfelt screen work to date as Saroo wrestles with conflicting loyalties — to Sue, saddened by his sudden withdrawal and by her troubles with Mantosh; to Lucy, keen to support him but increasingly shut out; and to his birth mother and brother, memories of them filling his head after being archived away in remote recesses for years. There are elements here that recall any number of sentimental dramas about characters reconnecting with their past. But the restraint and authentic feeling Davis brings to the material underscores at all times that Saroo’s amazing story is quite unique.

One could quibble about the protracted stop-start depiction of his search process, which seems designed merely to delay an outcome made obvious by the film's very existence. But there's no denying the swelling emotions of the final act, or remaining dry-eyed during the characters' joyous reunion.

Read full review at Hollywood reporter

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Movie Rating ★★★☆☆

Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman hunt Oscars in moving adoption drama

The true story of a man using Google Earth to track down his childhood home is often slight, but accomplished direction and themes of racial identity keep it on track

It’s been a rough few years for the Weinstein Company, both critically and commercially with Harvey Weinstein’s intimate relationship with the Oscars turning into more of a casual association. The giddy years that saw vanilla mum films like Chocolat and The Cider House Rules score with Academy voters came to an end and recent attempts to sneak in (with Southpaw, Big Eyes and Mandela) have left the brothers empty-handed.

A lot rides on this year’s crop and Lion is a film that’s been talked up as a major contender. It’s easy to see why with a strong cast, international themes and an emotional true story. From the outset, it’s a film that’s impossible not to find hugely involving. Two brothers, Saroo and Guddu, live in rural India and spend their days seeking out odd jobs to help their mother fund their home. But one day, the unimaginable happens as the brothers are separated and five-year-old Saroo finds himself on a train going cross country.

Arriving in Calcutta, unfamiliar with the language and unsure how to return home, he winds up in an orphanage that sees him adopted by a couple in Australia, played by Nicole Kidman and David Wenham. Saroo soon feels at home, comforted by the affection and calm after a harrowing experience, and grows up into a confident and ambitious 30-year-old, played by Dev Patel. As he combines a hotel management course and a burgeoning romance with a fellow classmate (a somewhat thankless role for Rooney Mara), he becomes haunted by the world he left behind. As he learns about the advent of Google Earth, he starts a difficult journey to find his family.

Thanks largely to an affecting performance from newcomer Sunny Pawar, the first act is horribly effective. The descent from the loving warmth of his family to the harshness of the streets has a nightmarish quality and we’re pulled along with him, nervous for his safety and eager for levity. Because of the urgency and suspense of these initial scenes, there’s an inevitable dip in pace as we skip forward to meet Saroo as a man. Patel, who is too often caught in broad roles, is given a chance to go deeper and, mostly, he succeeds as a man trapped between two worlds and two identities.

There are some nicely-observed scenes where we see him struggle with the privilege he now has, at odds with the poverty of his youth, and the conflict of cultures, unsure where he should be placed. But once his memories of back home are reawakened, the film flips into soul-searching mode and stays here for far too long. The drama of Saroo’s search is also mainly limited to a computer screen and we’re left with an unanswered question of whether he’s spent time looking for his family in the years inbetween. The script, based on Saroo Brierley’s book A Long Way Home, often struggles to expand what’s ultimately a rather short story into a two hour movie, which often risks diluting the power of the initial scenes.

Thankfully the film remains visually arresting throughout, due to accomplished work from first-time director Garth Davis. He riffs on the Google Earth theme and manages some stunning aerial vistas showcasing the contrasts and similarities of Australia and India. He keeps us engaged, even then the script repeats the odd note, and ensures that we’re eager for an emotionally satisfying conclusion. When it comes, it’s not quite the tear-jerking finale we’re expecting but, like the rest of the film, it’s admirably played and, despite some over-emphatic music, somewhat restrained.

Regardless of complaints, Lion is likely to strike a chord with many, including Oscar voters, and it’s refreshing to see the complications of a mixed racial identity brought to the screen. It might never roar but it’s still a fierce contender

Read full review at The Guardian

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‘Lion’ Brings Tears for a Lost Boy, Wiped Dry by Google

The first part of “Lion,” Garth Davis’s unabashedly tear-jerking movie about a remarkable real-world incident, has some of the scary, wondrous feeling of a fairy tale. The audience is invited to imagine a long-ago time — 1986, to be precise — before social media or smartphones or Google. In those days, a person could get lost, which is just what happens to a little boy named Saroo (Sunny Pawar), who accidentally travels more than 1,000 miles from his home in central India to the streets of Calcutta.

Saroo’s mother (Priyanka Bose) is a laborer in a poor village. He and his beloved older brother, Guddu (Abhishek Bharate), supplement her meager wages with whatever casual work they can find. In the first scene, they are scavenging lumps of coal to exchange for milk at the market. Later, Saroo follows Guddu to a railroad station, where the younger boy accidentally boards an out-of-service train that takes him to a city full of strangers who speak a different language.

With minimal dialogue and graceful editing, Mr. Davis and the screenwriter Luke Davies convey the Dickensian dimensions of Saroo’s situation. He is small and vulnerable, but also smart and resourceful, and even as he is exposed to horrifying cruelty, he is also a hero on an adventure. The enormous pain of his loss is sometimes mitigated by the excitement of discovery. You fear for him, and also root for him, and mostly you are captivated by his story and the sophisticated simplicity of its telling.

What happens in the second part of the movie is a little more complicated. Saroo (now played by Dev Patel) has grown to manhood as the adopted son of an Australian couple, John and Sue Brierley (David Wenham and Nicole Kidman). He has a brother, Mantosh (Divian Ladwa), who was also adopted from India and has mental health and substance-abuse problems. Despite that, Saroo seems to be living in the happily-ever-after stage of the fairy tale. He moves to Melbourne to study hotel management and falls in love with a fellow student, Lucy (Rooney Mara), from America.

But memories of his long-ago life haunt him, and the arrival of new technology raises the tantalizing possibility of a return to his first home. Using Google Earth, Saroo sets out to retrace, on the computer screen and on sheets of paper tacked to his bedroom wall, his accidental journey. It’s not a fast or easy process, and the effort takes an emotional toll on him, on his parents and on Lucy. But you know, even if you’re not familiar with the true story behind “Lion,” that the fairy tale will come true.

Mr. Davis, with strong assistance from a cast of dignified, charismatic criers and the music of Hauschka and Dustin O’Halloran, floods the viewer with big feelings. If you have ever been a child, raised a child, lost a child or met a child — or a mother — this movie will wreck you. As a purely emotional experience it succeeds without feeling too manipulative or maudlin. I mean, it is manipulative and maudlin, but in a way that seems fair and transparent.

Still, it isn’t quite satisfying. The transition from the young to the grown-up Saroo demands a shift in tone and genre that “Lion” doesn’t quite achieve. What felt in the first part like wonderful, Spielbergian simplicity feels, in the latter sections, like simplification. There isn’t enough of the rough texture of family life or the complications of young love to give the older Saroo a full identity. The movie hovers on the edge of going deeper into his psychological predicament but holds itself back.

At the end, the focus shifts from the agonies of Saroo to the glories of Google. I can’t complain too much about that; for all I know, Google brought you to this review. But I also can’t help feeling a dystopian chill amid all the warm don’t-be-evil fuzzies, a hint of corporate propaganda behind the fable. It is indeed remarkable how small the world has become, how many problems data can solve, how connected we all are to one another. But we’ve lost something, too, and we can’t even see what it is.

 Read full review at New york times

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Can you go home again? The lovely 'Lion' says yes

There are two ways to view "Lion." One is as a heart-warming tale of love beyond boundaries and the incandescent pull of home. The more cynical view is that it's a two-hour advertisement for the wonders of Google Earth.

Let's not be cynical, shall we? Let's just enjoy this poignant and true story of a man who became separated from his family in India at age 5, was adopted by an Australia couple and then tracked down his family 25 years after going missing.

"Lion " is really two beautifully-shot films — the tenacious story of 5-year-old Saroo Brierley lost hundreds of miles in eastern India and the less dramatic, and slightly forced, story of that same boy all grown up looking for answers about his past.

Dev Patel, of "Slumdog Millionaire" fame, proves he's a talented, striking leading man, but even he would admit he's delightfully overshadowed by newcomer Sunny Pawar, who plays his 5-year-old self with irrepressible sweetness. "I can lift anything," he says at one point, and proves it by lifting this film.

Luke Davies' screenplay, adapted from Brierley's memoir "A Long Way Home," starts in 1986 with the younger Saroo tagging along with his older brother to scrounge for work. He then falls asleep on a decommissioned train that travels some 1,600 kilometers to Calcutta.

Lost, hungry and scared, the boy isn't even able to seek help since he speaks only Hindi in an area where Bengali is the common language. He scrounges for food, turns a piece of cardboard into a bed and narrowly escapes child abductors before being taken to an orphanage that resembles a prison. It's a grim journey in which few adults are good. The camera doesn't shy away from staring at gritty places and forgotten people.

Salvation comes in the form of Nicole Kidman in a truly appalling '80s wig. She and David Wenham play an Aussie couple who adopt young Saroo and Kidman turns in a very unglamorous, quiet and meditative performance.

Director Garth Davis has got us in the palm of his hand at this point, with Saroo wide-eyed at encountering a plane and a refrigerator for the first time. But the second half of the film slackens somewhat as Patel takes over 25 years later.

He's great as a brooding, haunted man but he has less to work with. If the first half was a compelling, physical journey, the second is one taken solely inside the mind and the film degenerates into long moments showing Saroo's solitary wanderings and sleeplessness. The dense crowds of harsh, urban India give way to the empty, lush expanses of Tasmania.

The adult Saroo seems unmoored from his Indian roots until — like Marcel Proust's madeleine — he encounters a fried cake called a jalebi that triggers childhood memories. Someone helpfully suggests he look at Google Earth — yes, it's actually written into the script. (The company's logo also appears on the screen multiple times, on the movie poster and Google is thanked in the end credits. This is product placement on par with Reese's Pieces in "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.")

Soon, Saroo is pushing away his girlfriend (a very bad idea since it's the marvelous Rooney Mara) and studying satellite images from India by a certain internet company, tracing train tracks from a laptop. He has no idea where he came from and the film nicely uses flashbacks to show partial memories flooding back.

A breakthrough gets him on the right track and soon he's back on a plane, heading to his former home and a bittersweet finale with the people he left behind. It's all thanks to love, tenaciousness and, of course, the good folks at Google

 Read full review at Daily Mail

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Movie Rating ★★★★☆

 Nicole Kidman's Oscar contender will rip you to pieces

True stories of the somebody-got-famous kind are a dime a dozen in cinema. But the one in Lion, which just screened at the London Film Festival, involves no one you’ve ever heard of, doesn’t star a soul you’ll recognise for its first 40 minutes, and will rip you into a thousand pieces.

It’s the story of a lost boy: a five-year-old Indian called Saroo, who grew up in the 1980s in the area around Khandwa. The film begins with him pilfering lumps of coal off a train with his older brother, Guddu, and selling them to buy food. By the end of the first reel, these two are thousands of miles apart, wholly by mistake.

Left sleeping one night on a railway station bench, Saroo woke up alone and scared, and stumbled onto a decommissioned passenger train. Before he knew it, he was speeding his way to Calcutta, with no one to help, no Bengali to explain, and a place name for his home town that no one at the other end recognised.

The excellent script, by the Australian writer Luke Davies, sticks rigidly to Saroo’s own point of view as days, months, and eventually whole decades elapse with him effectively orphaned through freak circumstance. It’s derived from a 2012 memoir by the grown Saroo Brierley, called A Long Way Home. He can only imagine the agony his mum (Priyanka Bose) and brother must have gone through, endlessly searching.

With no paper trail or family name, he becomes a lost cause, shunted perilously for a while around India’s barely-existent social welfare system, and eventually shipped off to a pair of kindly foster parents in Tasmania, played by Nicole Kidman and David Wenham.

Saroo’s memories of his earlier life fade, but not completely. An awakening occurs when he’s 30 or so, and now played – in far and away his strongest performance to date – by Dev Patel. Finding a plate of jalebis at a party triggers a kind of Proustian flashback to the treats his brother always promised him. There are other clues he remembers, landmarks from his childhood, and so he set about scouring Google Earth across a huge radius of his home country, with only a rough distance from Calcutta to go by.

Saroo could easily have settled for this comfortable, educated life in Australia, with a career waiting in hotel management. But the fracturing of his identity is a dagger to the heart, and he can’t think of his former family without devastating remorse. He becomes obsessed, withdrawn, mentally ill.

Patel, so often encouraged to be cutely naïve, exudes all the right kinds of pain here, but also gives Saroo a bitter, self-flagellating core which feels like an especially brave choice, in a role (and film) which infinitely improve on his breakthrough in Slumdog Millionaire.

While Rooney Mara has a fairly limited function as Saroo’s girlfriend, Kidman enriches the film enormously. It’s a sterling, supportive performance. The script never lunges for cheap drama by forcing Saroo into a binary choice between mothers, and the most complex beats are about tip-toeing around, often counter-productively, to avoid hurt or betrayal.

Kidman’s Sue has her own story to tell, and holds onto it forcefully in the domestic scenes: she can embarrass her son with pride and love, but she’s also a fascinatingly strained figure, often barely keeping her grip. Right now, the Best Supporting Actress Oscar must be hers to lose.

Inescapably moving without going overboard, it’s quite a film debut for director Garth Davis, best-known for his collaboration with Jane Campion on Top of the Lake. A story with this much built-in emotion doesn’t need milking, but a certain holding back: it’s a smart move to have the dropped pins and smudged details of online mapping do all this for us.

Finding satellite images of a village, or even a house, isn’t necessarily finding family members who’ve stayed put inside it. Some may not even have survived. The wait to find out is agonising enough even for us – just try and imagine Saroo’s ordeal.

 Read full review at  Telegraph

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