Lion

Directed By: Garth DavisWritten By: Luke Davies (based on the memoir A Long Way Home by Saroo Brierley and Larry Buttrose)Starring: Dev Patel, Sunny Pawar, Nicole Kidman, Roonie Mara, David Wenham

The key to Lion’s success is that it ear

ns its inevitable sentimentality. If one is familiar with the story, a true story taken from Saroo Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home, one will be aware that Lion’s narrative transpires within a mawkish minefield, its payoff, an aspect by which the film must live or die, straddling the precarious tightrope of having to be grounded enough to achieve the humanism required for true affect, and having to be enough of an ornate melodrama to have the broad, crowd pleasing appeal it so feverishly strives for. It’s up to Garth Davis, making his feature film debut as a director, to deftly reconcile boisterous emotion and earthier reality. Ultimately, the first timer is up to the task, rounding his film with a suitably, cheer worthy finale, whilst maintaining just enough dirt under his nails in the process to keep proceedings honest.

It’s not all smooth sailing for Davis. There is a distinct rupture in the middle of the film, after which the director can’t help but inadvertently reveal his hand, trying to coax dramatic heft from his interplays too forcefully and wavering to the simplistic  tendencies of Luke Davies’ often heavy handed script. At times one can feel Davis straining for awards courting pathos, as if to bellow to the world that his film is eligible for Oscar consideration.

The rupture sees us jump forward in time by twenty years, where our protagonist has grown from a meek child living in India, to a university bound young man living in Australia. The young man is named Saroo and is played by Dev Patel. He lives happily with his adoptive parents, played by Nicole Kidman and David Wenham, and is set to study hotel management when we are reintroduced to him, his life well poised. But via a Proustian flashback memories begin to emerge of a five year old Saroo becoming estranged from his family. After following his brother into the city in hopes of helping his elder sibling labour for the good of their struggling family, Saroo falls asleep on a Calcutta bound, out-of-service train, whirling him 1500 kilometres cross country over two days and leaving him with an impossible gap to bridge back home, unable to even speak the dialect of where the train drops him. He flounders for months, is orphaned, and is eventually saved by his adoption, but no longer can he suppress his memories of his original mother and brother. Using nothing but Goggle maps and faded recollections, Saro

o endeavors to track his birth family down.

The performances in this post-rupture narrative are all strong. Dev Patel is well cast. He feels authentic in his role, charismatic even as the sting of Saroo’s past slowly enraptures him. Nicole Kidman and David Wenham beam with parental warmth and sincerity, particularly the former, who is given much heart ache to express as she slowly loses grip off her son as he is more and more enveloped by his quest. Notably underused is Roonie Mara, a fine actress who is reduced by Davies’ screenplay to a mere plot device. She plays Saroo’s girlfriend, but is given little to do besides prompt Saroo to articulate his pain.

It is the first half of Lion that truly allows its drama to carry so much weight. Sunny Pawar as the child incarnation of the protagonist steals the show; as adorable as he is tragic. It’s in these passages that Davis is most willing to get his hands dirty, refusing to flinch in his portrayal of the seedy side of India that threatens to chew the young Saroo and spit him out for dead. The film explores Saroo’s misadventures through Calcutta with unexpected depth and detail, the Indian passages both sprawling and harrowing.

We see a young Saroo join armies of uncared for children, abandoned kids who take refuge at train stops and who are later consigned to grizzly fates in overcrowded orphanages. We watch as Saroo is unnervingly examined by leering adults, a cold undercurrent of child abuse coursing through the drama. We watch as Davis’s snapshot into a poor family’s fight for daily food is enlarged to a seemingly infinite scope, India captured in its total vastity, lending credence to the futility of Saroo’s situation. It’s this sort of biting naturalism, this earthiness, through which Davis is able to make his tear laden climax count, through which the director is able to shake the simplicities which bog his film down in its middle act and deliver a cinematic treatment ultimately fitting of such an irresistible true story.

Rating:

3/4