lion
Lion, Harvey Weinstein’s big push for the Oscar race, sounds almost unbearably saccharine on paper. It tells the true story of a young boy named Saroo (Sunny Pawar), who suffers a run of inconceivable bad luck that ends with him lost on the streets of Calcutta, thousands of miles from home. Unable to speak Bengali or pronounce the name of his home town, he ends up in care, is subsequently adopted by a doting Australian couple (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham) and promptly whisked off to Tasmania. 20 years later, the adult Saroo (Dev Patel) embarks on a quest to track down his family, prompted by the launch of Google Earth. It’s easy to scoff, but Australian director Garth Davis handles the material deftly, particularly in the early scenes, where we really feel the disparity between Saroo’s perilous situation and the dramatic beauty of his surroundings. Crucially, it never seems like Davis is romanticising or trivialising poverty and hardship, as Danny Boyle was wont to do in Slumdog Millionaire. The mid-point time leap is handled clumsily – an obsession with tracking down his mother appears to take hold of Saroo with almost comic abruptness – but the film recovers in time to deliver a satisfyingly heart-wrenching climax.
LION | Directed by Garth Davis (Australia USA, UK 2016) with Dev Patel, Rooney Mara. Starts February 23.
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