Lion

You don’t find out why this film is called Lion until right at the very end. But, dur­ing the two hours you’re left guess­ing, you might haz­ard that it was refer­ring to some kind of Google Chrome exten­sion. Everyone’s favourite bil­lion dol­lar search engine assumes one of the lead roles in this tear­jerk­ing true tale of a dis­placed Indi­an street urchin whose late night Google Earth jags help him to recon­nect with his roots.

A series of unfor­tu­nate events leads knee-high cutiepie Saroo Brier­ley (Sun­ny Pawar) to be forcibly part­ed from his dirt poor fam­i­ly and their dingy hut in rur­al India. Wait­ing on a des­o­late sta­tion plat­form for his old­er broth­er to return from a work hook-up, he dozes off inside a train com­part­ment which then whisks him 1,600 kilo­me­tres across coun­try. Pen­ni­less, unable to speak the local dialect, and with no way to iden­ti­fy his moth­er beyond ​“mum”, he also can­not remem­ber the name of his vil­lage. Ini­tial­ly kicked to the curb before being swept up into the orphan­age sys­tem, a new life path beckons.

It’s evi­dent ear­ly on that direc­tor Garth Davis knows how to knock a film togeth­er. He gets the best of his exot­ic loca­tions with­out ever suc­cumb­ing to pic­ture-post­card land­scape porn. Very few shots are com­prised of emp­ty colour, and the ones that do are sub­tly loaded with nar­ra­tive por­tent. He also does well to rep­re­sent the extreme pover­ty of the locale with­out ever allow­ing his cam­era to grav­i­tate towards decon­tex­u­alised suf­fer­ing. There’s a snap­py dynamism to the edit­ing, emu­lat­ing the rush­ing pace of Saroo’s life, espe­cial­ly when in the lov­ing com­pa­ny of his broth­er Gud­du (Abhishek Bharate). Yet this is a more sen­si­tive, less impres­sion­is­tic approach to cul­tur­al depic­tion than, say, Dan­ny Boyle’s Slum­dog Millionaire.

At the mid­way point, the nar­ra­tive takes a giant 20-year leap into the future and the film frit­ters to pieces. No-non­sense sto­ry­telling is usurped by the queasy spec­ta­cle of hug­ging, cry­ing and bizarre facial nuz­zling. The film reveals its true nature as a covert piece of polit­i­cal advo­ca­cy on the joys of adop­tion, as Saroo (now played by Dev Patel) adjusts to a new life in a(nother) far off land – Tas­ma­nia. This sec­ond half also fills out the cast with big name actors, includ­ing Nicole Kid­man, David Wen­ham and Rooney Mara. It’s per­haps their pres­ence which saps the sto­ry of its vital­i­ty, replac­ing it with man­nered emot­ing and trem­ble-toned speechifying.

Where Davis tempts us in with his snap­py and appeal­ing visu­al flu­en­cy, he then repels us with deco­rous blue-grey melo­dra­ma. And despite the fact that through a host of cli­mac­tic inter-titles it is revealed that the film is work­ing in tan­dem with children’s char­i­ties, there’s no actu­al moral or mes­sage to pon­der. Unless it’s some unlike­ly para­ble about remem­ber­ing where you came from. Or maybe a cau­tion­ary tale about the kind­ness of strangers, espe­cial­ly those in the West with lots of dis­pos­able income. Or maybe it’s just a film that says, if you’re ever down in the dumps and freight­ed with high anx­i­ety, fire up your inter­net router, spend a night on the sofa ran­dom­ly rolling your cur­sor over Google Earth. Soon, all your prayers will be answered.