★★★
(PG), 118 minutes
If the story that underpins the new Australian picture Lion was fictional, people would scoff at its plausibility: a boy who gets separated from his family and is relocated to another country and another life, becomes a young man who uses Google Earth to reverse engineer his journey and find his loved ones. It sounds more like a clumsy piece of product placement for the tech behemoth than a feature film.
But Lion is based on A Long Way Home, the 2014 memoir of Indian-Australian businessman Saroo Brierley, whose upbringing truly did follow those unlikely stepping stones. Adapted by screenwriter Luke Davies and directed by Garth Davis, the movie mostly succeeds in grounding the hard to believe in easy to comprehend circumstances and readily real emotion. It's not a great film, but it's effective in how it sets up and satisfies a life-changing tale.
There are three distinct sections and the first is the best, a compelling act of survival in which the hero is a resourceful five-year-old boy. First seen filching coal from a train to sell in the company of his older brother Guddu (Abhisek Bharate), Saroo (Sunny Pawar) is a school-less scamp from central India surviving in poverty under the care of his mother (Priyanka Bose). The love he receives is plentiful, but everything else is in short supply.
Lost as a boy: Sunny Pawar in Lion.Credit: Mark Rogers
When Saroo accompanies Guddu on a work trip to a nearby city the exhausted boy lies down to sleep on a train platform. When he awakes there's no sign of his older sibling, so Saroo looks on a nearby train. Unable to exit the empty train compartment, Saroo is transported 1600 kilometres to Calcutta. It's a slow, steady ride into exile and Pawar's terrific, naturalistic performance evokes the panic and then incomprehension of leaving behind the little you know.
Davis, making his directorial debut after doing strong work alongside Jane Campion on the 2013 television drama Top of the Lake, really stamps a visual identity on these scenes. There's a tangible sense of scale between Saroo and the heaving city he finds himself in, but none of the usual cliches that mar outside visions of India. Along with cinematographer Greig Fraser (Zero Dark Thirty), Davis crafts evocative images but doesn't dwell on them.
"He's exactly what they're looking for," says a man with designs on Saroo, and the lack of an explanation only adds to the unease. When Saroo finds his way to baffled officials, an orphanage and then in 1987 adoptive parents from Hobart, John and Sue Brierley (David Wenham and Nicole Kidman), you can understand why he feels rescued. The pain is something he puts aside until he's a young man, played with an excellent Australian accent by Slumdog Millionaire's Dev Patel.
One of the picture's problem is that the feeling that Saroo is living out a storybook life, vivid and wide-eyed, never quite matches up to the churning angst that slowly washes over Saroo once he relocates to Melbourne to study hospitality and begins to admit he has no sense of his birthplace. "I'm not really Indian," he tells fellow students, and initially he doesn't want to search for his birth family because to do so would mean acknowledging the loss he's suppressed.
Dev Patel as Saroo in Lion.Credit: Mark Rogers
Saroo has no issues with his Australian upbringing, and Lion is unfortunately too cautious in examining his life. He literally steers clear of his adopted parents, not discussing his yearning to search with them (you know Saroo is serious when he gets a big board in his living room to pin clues on), and the friction with his younger, also adopted, brother, Mantesh (Divian Ladwa), never gets beyond the dinner-table difficulties stemming from Mantesh's mental health issues. There's too much affirmation.
Thankfully Rooney Mara (Carol) handles the role of Saroo's American girlfriend, Lucy. Mara's acute emotional bearings punctuate his feelings of not being complete, and sharpen up the stakes. It's a mostly thankless role, but expertly played, and like many of the elements in Lion it's executed with a skill and insight that can be rare to an inspirational piece such as this.
Of course, Google Earth eventually plays its part and the movie ends much as you would expect. It's near impossible to deny the emotion that wells up out of the dry Indian landscape in these final scenes, but nothing here is as compelling as the extended opening. Lion can't recover everything from Saroo's childhood.