You could find reasons to dislike Garth Davis’s ruthless hankie moistener. This is the sort of film on which the Weinstein brothers – back as producers – built their mighty empire: an Oscar-friendly tale of brave, muddy children. You might also whinge that there is something of the “white saviour” about it.
For anybody with a heart made of substances other than anthracite, such objections will wither on exposure to the film itself. Davis’s feature debut, nominated for all significant Oscar precursor awards, rings every available drop of emotion from an impossible true story.
Based on the ghosted memoir of the same name, Lion follows Saroo Brierley, an Australian adoptee, as he attempts to track down the family from which he was separated two decades earlier.
The young boy from Madhya Pradesh accidentally found himself on an out-of-service train heading for Kolkata. Once there, unable to speak Bengali, unsure even of his mother’s name, he became lost in the masses of similarly homeless children. Later, a couple from Tasmania adopted him. Much, much later, with the aid of Google Earth, he sought to find his way home.
The first half of the film feels like the best adaptation of Oliver Twist since David Lean. Sunny Pawar is heartbreaking as the young Saroo. Cinematographer Greig Fraser, fresh off Rogue One, relishes the beauty of the sprawling Indian countryside and locates endless horrors in the madly busy city. Knowledge of our narrative destination does nothing to dispel anxiety for Saroo's fate.
The Australian sequences lose a little momentum. Poor Rooney Mara is asked to play a completely superfluous girlfriend role.
Much of the action feels like a holding pattern before Saroo elects to log on and seek the truth. Happily, the right actors are on hand to flesh out the film with old-school class.
Playing the adult Saroo, Dev Patel reminds us that he has enough charm to talk a rabid wolf into pyjamas. Despite a wig that makes her look implausibly like Susan Boyle, Nicole Kidman radiates uncharacteristic warmth as the protagonist’s adoptive mother.
If you don’t blub at the end, you may wish to secede from the human species.
