★★★★☆
A deeply empathetic performance from Dev Patel and an unflinching view of child poverty on the streets of Calcutta provide a winning edge to Lion, a film that’s inevitably predisposed towards easy tears. The set-up alone, culled from the annals of real life, is enough to send bottom lips aquiver. It follows button-cute five-year-old Saroo (Sunny Pawar) as he accidentally boards a decommissioned train in Madhya Pradesh, central India, in 1986, and is trapped within its rattling carriages for over 24 hours until it reaches its destination, 1,500km away, in Howrah station, Calcutta. Saroo — lost and unable to name his home town or province — is reduced to shuffling around the station and (sniffle alert) yelling out the names of his mother (Priyanka Bose) and beloved brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate).
It goes from bad to hellish, alas, as the film, sticking closely to Saroo’s eventual autobiography A Long Way Home, depicts mid-1980s Calcutta as a nightmare world where the predation of vulnerable children is endemic, where street kids are plucked from the pavement by sinister adults and where orphanage bosses openly hand out charges to midnight callers with the line, “Bring him back in the morning.” Indeed, it’s a testament to the director Garth Davis (making his feature debut) and writer Luke Davies (Candy) that they didn’t elide this aspect, and that they managed to layer it into a PG-rated movie. It helps, of course, that there’s a fairytale quality — the boy on a life-defining search for his mother, who must first contend with the darkest possible forces.
Meanwhile, never fear, Kidman’s here! Saroo is adopted by a kindly couple from Tasmania, John and Sue Brierley, played by David Wenham and Nicole Kidman. In a role that could have easily been “boring liberal Western mom”, Kidman adds fascinating brittleness and a touch of quiet mania to scenes where she discusses her alcoholic father and the bonkers (if slightly racially queasy) vision she had of being saved by a beatific “brown-skinned boy”. The film, inevitably, does a hefty time jump (“20 years later”) to get to the real meat and potatoes, which is Patel as the grown-up Saroo, haunted by childhood memories and deciding, with the help of his girlfriend Lucy (Rooney Mara) and Google Earth, to begin a search for his home town and long-lost family.
Again, it could be soppy or, worse still, it could be dull (watching someone “do” Google Earth isn’t exactly The Hunger Games), but Patel invests so much in the character and delivers so many scenes in seemingly wide-eyed agony that you can’t help but cling to his every click, step and misstep.
If not quite the year’s podium-nabbing best, it’s certainly an awards season-worthy performance. Mara, on the other hand, is shamefully underused. Her character simply exists to shadow Saroo’s search, mop his brow and help him with his mouse.
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In the end there’s a resolution, but also a sting in the tail. It makes the journey bittersweet, the story elegiac, and defines the movie as a muscular tearjerker for adults and children alike.
PG, 118min