The Weinstein Company
Ah, the adaptation of real world events movie. We’ve got plenty of them every year, with at least twelve movies this year alone, and they always vary in quality. Often they do seem to be the sort of either “feel good awards bait” or “feel bad awards bait” movies you’d expect, but sometimes they surprise you. And sometimes they don’t.
Lion comes from first time director Garth Davis and stars Dev Patel as Saroo. When Saroo was just a child (and played by Sunny Pawar), he lost his brother while on a train in India. He was too young to know his full name or his mother’s name, and the movie starts with the adventure of his survival. For me, this was interesting if uneven, but seeing how Saroo managed to keep going despite losing everything was engaging.
Eventually, he would getting adopted by an Australian couple, John (David Wenham) and Sue Brierley (Nicole Kidman). The only rub is that they also adopt another boy named Mantosh (played as an adult by Divian Ladwa), and he has undefined behavioral problems that hurt the family. Eventually, the movie skips ahead to grad student Saroo where he meets Lucy (Rooney Mara), who becomes his girlfriend and helps to inspire his quest.
Because of this new software called “Google Earth,” much of the world has been mapped, and Saroo hoped to use it track down where he got lost, and hopefully, figure out where he came from. Thus begins a very long series of scenes of Saroo staring silently at screens, clicking buttons, and feeling morose. I felt often like I had no real sense of what, if any progress he was making.
Some manufactured drama comes up with Lucy frustrated with Saroo’s seemingly pointless search and that his parents feel hurt by Saroo’s search for his birth family. But it’s hard to feel like it’s even a real story. When the final story beats hit and the music swells, you can feel the movie aching desperately for you to feel something. Why, it’s an Indian-born orphan raised by a white family and he doesn’t even speak his native tongue! Isn’t that just the greatest?
I feel like there is potentially an inspiring story in here, and I know the movie is based on the autobiographical book by the real life Saroo. But Lion is constructed as pure awards bait fodder, from the “foreigner” angle to the “white people presence” angle to the name itself. The book that was the film’s basis is called A Long Way Home, and that’s only a bit pretentious. The explanation of the film’s name comes literally at the last second, and I am sorry to say, I just rolled my eyes at a moment meant to be triumphant.
Now, with all that said, I have nothing but praise for Dev Patel here, connecting strongly to a complex role who’s not given enough to do. But he does a great job. Nicole Kidman is getting some praise for this, but I think she’s just okay, not particularly great. If Google needed an advertisement (which it doesn’t), the idea of “Google helping you reunite with your long lost family” sounds pretty epic. But the only thing I really wanted to do was read about the real life story, and I don’t want to see this movie again.
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