Movie Review: "Lion"

"Lion": B.  British actor Dev Patel made his silver screen debut for US audiences in the surprise hit Slumdog Millionaire (pre-blog rating of B+).  Released here in 2009, the film won the Academy Award Oscar for Best Picture.  Patel, who was only seventeen when that movie was shot, portrayed the title character, a product of the slums of Mumbai.  In Lion, which was one of nine films nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award three months ago, Patel's character again plays an adult whose history has been shaped by a previous life in Indian slums, this time Calcutta's.  Although Lion fell short in the latest Oscar competition, it was a worthy entry whose chances for the ultimate prize were probably hurt by a downshifting in tempo at approximately the two-thirds point in the story.

The film covers a twenty-five year span, beginning in 1986, when five year old Saroo (Sunny Pawar) and his older brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate) are being raised by their illiterate mother in a hut off a dirt road in Khandwa.  Guddu teaches Saroo the risky practice of hopping freight trains and stealing coal from the gondola cars, then trading their booty for food staples.  Their mother, who also has an infant daughter, instructs her young sons to look after the baby, but the adventure-seeking boys can't resist the thrills of running into the city.  One of those adventures turns into a misadventure when the brothers get separated and a panicked Saroo finds himself trapped alone on a train bound for Calcutta, sixteen hundred kilometers from home.

Saroo quickly learns that his native Hindi is not understood by the Bengali-speaking populace of Calcutta, thus making his plight even more dire.  He has a few narrow escapes from those who would do him grave harm, eventually ending up in an orphanage.  There he learns English, thus setting himself up for adoption by an Australian couple, Susan (Nicole Kidman) and John (David Wenham) Brierly, who live in Tasmania.
 

Screen writer Luke Davies and director Garth Davis quickly leapfrog twenty years, which is when Patel makes his appearance as the young adult Saroo.  The pathetic life Saroo led in India is far behind him.  In Tasmania, the loving Brierlys have raised him like their own offspring, along with another Indian boy, the troubled Mantosh (Divian Ladwa), whom they adopted a few years after Saroo.  Saroo is now a college student in Melbourne, taking up hotel management.  He and his American girlfriend, Lucy (Rooney Mara), hang out with a diverse group of other college kids, some of whom are Indian.  Saroo misses the Brierlys, but it isn't until he spots jalebi in the kitchen at a house party that recollections of his biological family tug at his heart.  Jalebi is an Indian pastry loved by Saroo and Guddu when they were boys.

Deeply affected by memories of his difficult childhood, thoughts of returning to India fill Saroo's mind.  He tells Lucy that he's sure his family is still searching for him all these years later.  He feels guilty for having lived a privileged life in Australia while the family he left behind barely survives in squalor.

Saroo is faced with one major obstacle: Ever since that fateful long train ride as a five year old, he has never been able to recall the name of his family's town.  Will he return to India, and if so, will he ever reconnect with his Indian family?  How will Lucy and the Brierlys take this new development?

Although Patel gets top billing as the adult protagonist, a performance which earned him a Best Supporting Actor nomination, it is little Sunny Pawar who steals the show as the adorable youngster Saroo.  Pawar is on the screen for about half the film.  I just wanted to give him a big hug and buy him a juicy steak with a jumbo platter of jalebi for dessert.
 

There was an article recently in the Star Tribune which explained how the local authorities were forming a task force to be on the alert for signs of human trafficking in the Twin Cities during the Super Bowl festivities early next year.  Many of the minors who are victims of that repulsive crime originate from India and other countries of southeastern Asia.  In Lion, some of the scenes of young, homeless Saroo, sleeping with other kids on cardboard mats in dirty Calcutta subway stations, are scary.  The difference between narrow escape and ending up in a kidnapper's clutches can be only a matter of inches.  I will be thinking of those scenes as the Super Bowl approaches.