The other day Jan and I and Jan’s mom went to see Lion, the film based upon Saroo Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home. I admit I was a wary. I understood the story was to be about someone adopted from India, who returns as a young adult to find his lost birth family. The possibilities for a cheap emotional rollercoaster ride were pretty strong. Still, we went. And, I’m glad we did.
This seems a movie made for our times. Particularly at this moment in the turning from one year, that at several levels has been particularly hard and toward another that seems destined for more of the same, and in my darker fantasies, much, much worse.
The storyline is a bit more complicated than I understood, but not a whole lot. The movie, and, I’m not sure, perhaps a full half of the story features five-year old Saroo, played by the amazing young talent Sunny Pawar, as a child of extreme poverty, who through a series of events is separated from his family, his mother played by Priyanka Bose and brother played by Abhishek Bharate, and finds himself alone in a big and very dangerous city. The poverty and horrors that poverty bring along were not turned away from in the film, although the worst of it was hinted at rather than shown face on – for, which, frankly, I was grateful.
Several reviews used the word Dickensian. And the world the film portrays is without a doubt a Dickensian world. Dickensian is a word I fear we are going to become more and more familiar with in coming years. In fact for me it was hard to miss the world that is portrayed and the world we are moving toward with such extremes of poverty and wealth and what that does to people, while at the same time also reveals that people can and do rise above the twisting horrors, if never completely free of the scars such dreadful things leave in their wake.
The second half of the movie features Dev Patel (of Slumdog Millionaire and the Marigold Hotel films fame) as the young adult Saroo, David Wenham and Nicole Kidman (doing a star turn) as his adoptive parents, Divian Ladwa as his adoptive brother Mantosh who ably demonstrates that the trauma described sometimes is overwhelming, and Rooney Mara as Saroo’s American girlfriend, Lucy.
Here we quickly learn that Saroo, who has been a star of achievement, is, just like Mantosh, deeply wounded. Thanks to Google Earth he begins an obsessive quest to find his birth family, while at the same time feeling enormous guilt that somehow he is betraying the people who adopted him, loved him, and gave him a life full of possibility. The story follows a relentlessness toward a resolution that is as satisfying as one can hope. And, yet, somehow the mawkishness and cheap sentimentality that one would assume accompanies such a movie never happens, or, well, almost never. It is a two, three, or depending on who you are, five hankie film. But, done perfectly, perfectly.
The screenplay is by Luke Davies and it is directed with grace and intelligence by Garth Davis.
At Rotten Tomatoes eighty-six percent of the one hundred, fourteen professional reviewers gave the movie a thumb up. And a full ninety-one percent of the near eighty-four thousand non-professional viewers who chose to record a sentiment, liked it.
While the movie itself is satisfying, it opens feelings and thoughts that are far from anything that could be described as “satisfying.” There are questions of poverty and wealth and the evils that flow from great inequities. There are questions of the morality of a rich culture drawing upon a poor one for children. There is a nagging question, at least in my heart, of whether this is actually the world that we are bequeathing to the next generation.
As I said we saw this movie the other day. In the days that have followed it has simply marinaded in my heart.
So much sadness. And, in the midst of it, so much that is lovely. Along with some secret heart of possibility being hinted at, if not directly pointed to.
Kind of like life itself.
A worthy one hundred and twenty minutes.
I recommend it.
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