Because it’s cathartic and optimistic, it also leaves us remarkably clearheaded. It demonstrates the power of an individual to reclaim his past and to merge legacies from two different cultures. Lion does exactly what the movie version of this real-life saga (based on Brierley’s memoir, A Long Way Home) should do.
When Davis read it (as he told The Hollywood Reporter), “ Wall-E was somehow floating around in my head - that little robot wandering around that post-apocalyptic landscape.” Working close to their instincts and at the peak of their abilities, the filmmakers intimately chart the growth of a character’s awareness from a child battered by events to an adult who welds together mightily different aspects of his life. Davies wrote a script grounded in the experience of the 5-year-old, Saroo (Sunny Pawar), letting his tragedy unroll from the boy’s own perspective. The movie does exert a visceral pull and surrounds audiences with its spaciousness and sweep, but I think its accomplishment goes deeper. The director, Garth Davis (who made four episodes of Jane Campion’s miniseries, Top of the Lake), and the screenwriter, Luke Davies (also a novelist and poet), have used adjectives like “epic” and “mythical” to describe their attraction to the material. A nail-biter with no artificiality, filled with sentiment that elicits honest tears, Lion becomes a stirring quest movie when the grownup Saroo Brierley (Dev Patel) embraces a wave of primal feeling and resolves to find his hometown and his birth family. Unable to read or write or to speak Bengali dialect or even to provide his mother’s or his own correct name, he rebounds from the teeming city’s mean streets to a Dickensian orphanage and from there to a loving home on the Australian island of Tasmania, with his adoptive parents Sue and John Brierley (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham).
Lion tells the harrowing fact-based story of a 5-year-old boy from an impoverished hamlet in central India who gets separated from his older brother after a train ride to a nearby city and winds up at the chaotic Howrah Station in Kolkata (the former Calcutta), roughly 1600 kilometers away.
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