Yet another sentiment-driven heartstring-tugger this awards season, Lion is better than most of its ilk. Featuring a fabulous performance from newcomer Sunny Pawar, the film follows young Saroo as he gets lost from his Indian family, taken across the country and the hemisphere to a new life in Australia. Growing up into Dev Patel, he seeks out his original home and family. Sound dull? You wouldn't exactly be wrong.
What sets Lion apart -- besides the killer performance from Pawar and a far more somber Patel -- are a few technical elements. Most of its glory goes straight to cinematographer Greig Fraser (Rogue One, Foxcatcher, Zero Dark Thirty), who finds poetry in the bleakest of places and smallest of images. While he utilizes sweeping vistas of the wide world to contrast the intimate nature of the story, he ties together motif after symbol after icon and brings a level of myth to the tale, heightening it beyond what would otherwise be a Hallmark special. The score by Hauschka and Dustin O'Halloran is also nice, though not particularly noteworthy in my book.
Unfortunately the problems with this film are appropriately lion-sized, and most are due to Luke Davies's screenplay. Its Dickensian first half, while engaging, is uniformly derivative. While it succeeds in crafting loving familial dynamics and the complex visual narration of a lost child, its character-driven focus is lost by the onset of the second half of the film. By the time Patel graces the screen, we're so in love with sweet little Saroo that we don't care much about this big man (despite his charm and good looks) or the uninteresting people around him, and his lack of communication makes him a mystery even to us. He's so locked in his own mind that we cannot access or sympathize with his inarticulate obsession with searching for his birth family, a plot device so basic to our culture that it should be a crime to get it this badly wrong. Director Garth Davis allows sentiment to so tyrannically reign that he ignores the necessity of presence and immediacy, forcing us to endure flashback after flashback of the first half, reminding us that it promised a better film than it gave.
As if that wasn't enough, the climax comes at such a cheap cost I would have walked out if I didn't want to keep Dev Patel in my eyeballs. Just as all hope seems lost for Saroo (though, plotwise, there's no real impetus for a climactic moment here), DEUS EX MACHINA. Literally. God in the laptop. He blearily slips his finger across Google Earth and happens to spot the quarry where his mother labored. Because obviously rocks are so memorable. Especially when they are viewed from a brand new angle (satellite) twenty years after a child ran through them. Maybe you think it's sweet, but it was all I could do to stop from guffawing aloud at the screen.
If those kinds of silly things don't bother you, you might just like the film. Even I didn't particularly dislike it, though I'm partial to Fraser's camerawork, Patel's talent and body, and Kidman's everything. Speaking of which, my Nicole does fine here, though she and David Wenham are woefully underused as Saroo's foster parents. Meanwhile Rooney Mara shows up in a terrible role as the dramatically flat girlfriend, though she does what she can with the passive caricature. Maybe I'm being too critical. I was severely disappointed, though, in how the film plays everything so damn safe. Tons of deep emotional ground is left buried. Richly complex ideas about family structure, race and ethnicity, class, and (most important) identity are quickly introduced and just as quickly forgotten.
It's a shame, really, because a movie about shifting identities (especially racial and ethnic ones) and cross-cultural families and friendships are more important now than ever.
IMDb: Lion
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