Review: Lion

Lion (PG)

Australia 2016 118 mins  Dir: Garth Davis  Cast: Sunny Pawar, Dev Patel, Rooney Mara, Nicole Kidman, David Wenham

A slumdog drama with Dev Patel? Lion might be based on a true story, but there’s a strong whiff of calculation about the Weinstein Company’s awards season contender. That’s not the only problem. The PG certificate means that punches are pulled when it comes to conveying the dangers faced by its initially pint-sized protagonist. And the film’s powerful first half gives way to a slow, boring and manipulative final stretch with one of those real-life twists that struggle to convince as drama.

Set in 1986, the Slumdoggy opening 45 minutes follow perky five-year-old Saroo (an excellent performance by aptly named Sunny Pawar) as he helps his poverty-stricken mum in the family rock carrying business and eagerly sets out to prove himself every bit the equal of his older brother, Guddu. While the duo are looking for work, Saroo nods off aboard a decommissioned train and awakes to find himself rattling at high speed towards Calcutta, 1,500 miles away. Alone and terrified in a teeming metropolis, he struggles to make himself understood because everyone converses in Bengali rather than the Hindi he speaks at home.

First-time feature director Garth Davis, who co-directed Top of the Lake with Jane Campion, is at his best in these long, mostly wordless sequences, effectively conveying Saroo’s disorientation in the city’s Dickensian underbelly, where groups of homeless children huddle together on sheets of cardboard and are pursued by sinister predators whose nature is only hinted at. Two months later, we find the dishevelled nipper sifting through crap on a rubbish dump. Eventually, a kindly stranger takes him to an orphanage, where he claims he comes from ‘Ganestalay’. But since no one knows where that is, and an extensive search proves fruitless, he’s shipped off to Tasmania to be adopted by nice Nicole Kidman (sporting an unflattering curly wig) and her hubby David Wenham.

The film then jumps forwards 20 years, shifts abruptly in tone and starts to unravel as we find the handsome adult Saroo (Patel) studying hotel management, copping off with American fellow student Rooney Mara (presumably cast in this thankless role to secure US distribution) and becoming increasingly obsessed with tracking down the family he left behind. Trouble is that even those who haven’t read the memoir on which Lion is based will know that it’s billed as a feelgood tearjerker, so we all know where this is headed. Undoing all the good work of that first half, Davis makes particularly heavy going of it and is hampered by a big ‘Eureka!’ moment that feels fake even if it’s an accurate depiction of what happened.

To be fair, he does avoid some of the familiar pitfalls, such as portraying Kidman and Wenham’s characters as two-dimensional, culturally insensitive middle class do-gooders who are poor substitutes for the Indian lad’s birth mother. Indeed, throughout his search Saroo stresses that he loves all those who raised him equally. In a refreshing change from the conventional family values guff pumped out by the film industry, Kidman also gets a big emotional speech in which she explains to her adopted son that the couple were perfectly capable of breeding but felt there were already too many people in the world so chose to improve the lives of disadvantaged children instead.