Lion (2016)

Cast: Sunny Pawar, Dev Patel, Rooney Mara, David Wenham, Nicole Kidman

Director: Garth Davis

Synopsis: A five-year-old Indian boy gets lost on the streets of Calcutta, thousands of kilometres from home. He survives many challenges before being adopted by a couple in Australia. 25 years later, he sets out to find his lost family.

“You just can’t make this stuff up”

           -Mr. J d’Aquila, 2017

Lion.

A story about a boy in search of his parents, a brother he lost so many years ago and a life that was taken away from him because he got tired one day on a train in the middle of India as he disappears into the unforeseen future ahead of him.

What’s fascinating about Lion is the idea that a story can be so simple, but when taken from different point of views with flashbacks and not being certain if you can trust the main character’s “flashbacks”, it makes such a storyline that much more enthralling.

While on a train trip looking for work, Saroo and his older brother, Guddu, are separated and Saroo ends up on a train that carries him 1,000 miles from home.  The first half of Lion is full of two attempts at changing Saroo’s life forever. This occurs while he’s alone on the streets, escaping kidnapping with a half dozen other children, followed by a couple who would do God knows what to Saroo until he’s finally brought to an orphanage. From there he’s sent to Tasmania, Australia and adopted by a childless white couple. A year later, Mantosh, Saroo’s new brother, arrives a year or so later, and Saroo’s past in India begins to fade as his new life in Tasmania forges on.

The movie is a look at technological developments, the social aspects around being part of a mixed racial, adoptive family and mental health, all wrapped up nicely in two hours. He uses Google Earth and maths to figure out where he travelled from, what train he was on and more by using train speeds and track distances. For a moment, you forget all the technology rhetoric that you hear in media and think how tech is helping orphans find their families after falling asleep on trains in India 25 years ago.

Lion is moving. It allows you to experience the life of someone else while sitting in your seat, which is an incredible feat that many movies fail to do. Moments never feel cliché, just real. Nothing, no moment or line or action felt falsified or inaccurate to the setting (but then again, how much can I say as a white, non-adopted Canadian about the accuracy of the life of a brown, adopted Indian-born Australian, as depicted by a movie?)

This movie puts a lot of things into perspective: that the world is merciless, that life is random and every little action creates massive change. Getting lost on a train, running away from people who you feel might do you harm, the endless search for the family you thought you’d never see again; it’s all life changing, it’s all incredible.

I’d like to take a moment to appreciate Dev Patel in this movie and just comment on how hair and makeup did such a great job; commenting on how the third time I watched this movie I cried a little when the wind moved his hair. I’m just so fond of this guy… wow. Kirsty McGregor (Lion’s casting director) did amazing work with this film. The relationship between Saroo and the rest of his family (both biological and otherwise) seem so genuine. One can relate to the anger and frustration, as well as feel the care of Saroo’s parents as the movie lets us become its characters while watching. Director Garth Davis deserves credit for his ability to make us feel- truly feel what these characters are feeling, without having them explain their feelings in the traditional form of narrative. Hell, every person on Lion’s IMDB page deserves more than a sentence of praise, going all the way down to the person who probably walked Dev Patel from scene to scene (Tim Hodgson, per IMDB. He got to run everywhere. Great job, Tim!)

On a final, considerably more serious note, this movie was amazing. Like, I-could-talk-about-it-for-hours-and-give-the-whole-plot-away-and-not-feel-bad-about-it amazing. In all honesty, the film is an incredible depiction of life. It examines people discovering themselves in relation to everyone else, finding themselves and their place in the world, and uncovering the truths about themselves and learning that who you are is more than where you’re from or what your name is, but who you surround yourself with and how you treat those people.