Welcome to another entry in the vaunted Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com! When I started this project five years ago I'd seen 214 Best Pic nominees, and since that time I've viewed an additional 150. Pretty cool, huh?
We're headed back to the mid-teens for one of the less-talked about Best Picture nominees of 2016, one that I kept putting off for whatever reason, the Garth Davis-helmed biographical drama Lion, starring Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman. Based on actual events, Lion is the tale of a boy named Saroo from a tiny village in India, who in 1986 got separated from his family when he fell asleep on an empty train one night, waking up hundreds of miles away in a different region of the country with an entirely different language. After months of living on the streets he was brought to the police by a concerned citizen and placed in an overcrowded orphanage, and ultimately adopted by an Australian couple. Twenty years later as an adult, Saroo is on his way to a promising career in the hotel business, but finds himself suddenly obsessed with reconnecting with the life he'd left behind. The problem is he never learned his mother's full name, nor the correct name of his village, and the train stop he remembers is one of hundreds in the region.
This film really took me by surprise. I anticipated a well-made but rather saccharine drama that was all about the feelgoods. What I got instead was a very fleshed out first act where we spend a good forty minutes with Saroo as a child, experiencing his destitute home life and being fully let in on how much his older brother Guddu means to him. When he becomes lost and homeless, the film plunges us into his isolation and disorientation, as well as his extreme peril in the dangerous city of Calcutta, where he's almost kidnapped twice and lives under a bridge for two months. The orphanage environment isn't a whole lot better; he has to contend with overcrowding and neglect as the authorities search in vain for his family. I was shocked at how much the first act was allowed to breathe, and simultaneously how quickly it flew by. The filmmakers give Saroo's backstory plenty of weight and grit, aided by the incomparable Grieg Fraser's handling of the cinematography, and thus we're totally bought in for the second and third acts.
When we meet Saroo again as an adult, he seems quite well-adjusted thanks to a set of loving adoptive parents (who have also adopted a much less well-adjusted second child Mantosh, prone to violent bouts of self-harm and disappearances, for which Saroo deeply resents him. At school Saroo meets Lucy (Rooney Mara), an American classmate who takes an immediate interest in his story and encourages his search for home. But Saroo becomes so obsessed and so guilt-ridden at the thought of how much pain his mother and siblings must have endured over the years that it derails his existing relationships.
Dev Patel is such a thoroughly relatable, open-faced actor he's able to convey all of Saroo's inner conflict and sorrow through minimal dialogue, without overdoing any of the role's physicality. A simple glance at a laptop screen as he finds a lead on Google Earth, coupled with a childhood flashback confirming he's at long last made real progress, pushes emotional buttons without feeling cheap. In lesser hands this could've played out like a Hallmark movie, but it's made so well the inevitable heartstring-tugging moments feel earned.
Rooney Mara is given a bit of a thankless role here as the supportive but underappreciated love interest, but she too leans into subtlety and nuance to make the character memorable and real. Nicole Kidman as Saroo's adoptive mother gets one of the film's best moments when she gives a surprising explanation for why she and her husband chose adoption over having their own children.
But the film's biggest casting coup might be Sunny Pawar as five-year-old Saroo. Amazingly even with no previous acting experience, Sunny's performance is basically note-perfect. In spite of the austere living conditions in which he was raised, young Saroo dearly loves his family and has a particularly strong bond with Guddu. Sunny very naturalistically conveys the terror and heartbreak at being separated from everything he knows, but somehow keeps his head once set loose in the streets of Calcutta, as one would be required to. This is a great performance from a gifted young actor.
As I said, the film's payoff could so easily have felt cheeseball and facile, but Saroo's story and subsequent search are given so much gravitas the conclusion has real emotional resonance. We can all of course relate to the idea of wanting to revisit people and places from our past, but what if those things were prematurely stolen from us or vice versa? How much would the unanswered questions and unresolved feelings gnaw at us? How much agony would it cause knowing how our earliest loved ones have suffered during our absence? Lion beautifully explores these ideas from a place of genuine empathy, and when it comes time to let us off the hook, we don't feel cheated, we feel rewarded.
I give Lion **** out of ****.
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