Why did I wait this long to see a rather popular, uncontroversial Academy Best Picture nominee? Mainly because the plot summary sounded like all I needed to know. It's even been adapted into a TV commercial, so how much more could we get from a nearly two-hour movie? Still, six Oscar nods, even without wins, are nothing to sneeze at, and this was the most tempting option on my streaming list at the moment.
The true story begins in a little-known Indian town in 1986, with a family poor enough to make some desperately risky choices. Such risks lead to five-year-old Saroo (Sunny Pawar) waking on a train far from his family. Knowing way too little information to return, he ends up in an orphanage and is then adopted by a Tasmanian couple (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham). Only more than halfway through the film do we come to the unique aspect: After two decades, someone gives Saroo (now played by Dev Patel) the idea to use Google Earth until he recognizes his hometown.
In case you're wondering about the title, it's a translation of Saroo's original name, Sheru. I'm not sure how common it is for five-year-olds to mess up their own first names, but in fairness, he'd been out of India long enough to forget his first language, Hindi.
A secondary character is Mantosh (Keshav Jadhav in childhood and Divian Ladwa in adulthood), Saroo's subsequently adopted brother. From the start, he is prone to tantrums that involve striking his own head, and he never fully outgrows them. We never learn much of his story, but Saroo accuses him of making things hard for their adoptive parents. Mantosh has basically no bearing on the main plotline; you can bet that if the filmmakers didn't care about fidelity to reality, they'd either weave him in more intricately or exclude him altogether.
Near as I can tell, the only major deviation by the screenwriter (the on-screen anachronisms can hardly be blamed on him) was to combine Saroo's multiple girlfriends into one, Lucy (Rooney Mara), whose presence adds to the emotional components of his identity crisis. Most notably, she encourages him to tell his adoptive parents about his search, but he fears breaking their hearts. The quest drives a bit of a wedge between him and local loved ones.
Obviously, this story wouldn't be told if Saroo didn't succeed eventually. And yes, it becomes heartwarming. But I hesitate to recommend this to the same audience as many other movies with belated family reunions: They tend to be more family-friendly. This one gets a PG-13, primarily because before reaching the orphanage, Saroo meets some people who promise to help him look for home but evidently plan to make a sex slave of him. I'm sure he can't guess the precise nature of their designs, but he senses enough to run. Hmm, maybe you'd want your kids to see this just so they get the idea to run from similarly suspicious characters as well.
In general, Lion feels a bit like two movies, helped along by the considerable visual differences between Pawar and Patel. First comes the terror of a little boy having to get by with much less than he should; then comes a mostly content maturity disrupted by occasional flashbacks from a nebulous former life. Viewers tend to like the first half more. It manages to be both less complex and more filling somehow, probably because an on-and-off Google Earth search does not lend itself to cinema. I wasn't bored, but it's almost like having just the Julia half of Julie & Julia followed by just the Julie half.
Am I glad to have learned the story? Yes. Would I have bothered to learn as much from another format? Probably not. Is film the natural medium for it? Hardly. But I won't begrudge Lion its honors any more than I'll complain about what it missed.
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