Lion

seen on 21 February 2017

Garth Davis directs this movie which is based on the true story of Saroo, a young Indian boy who accidentally becomes lost through being transported across the sub-continent to Calcutta when he falls asleep in a train carriage. After some months as a streetchild, he is placed in an orphanage and then adopted by a Tasmanian couple, Sue and John Brierley. The adult Saroo becomes fixated on finding his birthplace, and is eventually able to use Google Earth in his quest to be reunited with his birth mother. Nicole Kidman and David Wenham play the Brierleys while Dev Patel plays the adult Saroo and Sunny Pawar plays Saroo from the ages of 5 to 7.

The opening sequences depicting Saroo's childhood are brilliantly filmed, helped by an extraordinary performance by the young boy playing the part. Saroo begs to be allowed to accompany his older brother to some night work, but tiredness overwhelms him and he is left to rest on a bench on a railway platform. Seeking more comfort when he awakes on the deserted platform, he settles down in a carriage, woken some hours later by the motion of the train which has now left his home town bound for Calcutta. As the train is in transit without passengers, no-one is able to rescue or help him. His bewilderment and panic is complete when he arrives in Calcutta unable to understand anyone unless they speak to him in Hindi rather than Bengali. Furthermore, being so young, he has only a hazy idea of where he has come from (the place name he offers means nothing to any official who tries to help).

The strangeness and the potential threat of the big city are evoked by the ow-level shots of crowds, the child's eye perspective adding to the sense of isolation and his resourcefulness providing a couple of lucky breaks from potential abuse or exploitation. But the official orphanage is not a particularly happy place either, overcrowded with abandoned and often unwell children. The decision that he should be adopted in Australia seems entirely arbitrary from his point of view, though it proves to be a lifeline to a better life (just as his adoptive parents hoped). There is a small scene where prospective adoptees are being taught Western table manners, which is delightful to watch after the harum-scarum episodes preceding it; the children seem hugely entertained by the game, quite unaware of its real significance.

The second half of the film has been criticised for being less successful than the first, partly because the dramatic tension inevitably slackens and partly because it might be seen as a long commercial for Google Earth. But I found it well managed, engaging, and at times very moving. For one thing, as Saroo's search begins to dominate his life, leading him to abandon his girlfriend and his job, and even to lose touch with his Australian parents (as he doesn't want to admit to them what he is doing), there are clear indications of the damage this is causing to the people around him as much as to himself. For another, there is a second adopted brother who is mentally far more fragile than Saroo, and his presence, his absence, and his erratic behaviour all complicate the family dynamics even when the boys are grown up. Saroo's final success in locating his birthplace and finding his mother may seem implausibly achieved - but it did happen, as some footage of the real people of the sotry shows at the end of the film. 

The sense of disruption, of wanting to know, of needing to go back in order to go forward, are all strongly evoked in a sensitive performance by Dev Patel as the adult Saroo, while Nicole Kidman gives an excellent performance as Sue Brierley, a woman whose determination to bring up an adopted family stems from a defining inspiration in her early adolescence. This may raise questions of cultural presumption (giving disadvantaged children from another country a 'better chance' elsewhere), but at the personal level of the Brierleys no-one could complain of their commitment to what they were doing; their wholehearted support of Saroo's search when they finally learn of it shows their real altruism and love.

It is, for sure, at one level a feel-good movie - but these sorts of feelings deserve to be good and to be acknowledged in this increasingly hostile world.