It's little wonder that “Lion” has collected quite a few audience awards at festivals since premiering in Toronto in September. Truly intelligent crowd-pleasers that avoid blatant manipulation are a rarity, but director Garth Davis (TV’s “Top of the Lake”) and screenwriter Luke Davies mostly keep any sentimental overload at bay until the very end—and, by that time, it is exactly what the audience needs and the film deserves.
Emotional triggers might arrive at several points during this decades-spanning tale of longing and loss that is also a mystery about an unknown past. For me, the killer moment was when the adult Saroo—in the form of a beefed-up Dev Patel, whose 2008 breakout film “Slumdog Millionaire” serves as a sort of companion piece to “Lion”—finally and somewhat guiltily confesses to his Australian adoptive mother, Sue, that he has been spending countless days doing research while seeking out his birth family via Google Earth.
The reason for his secrecy? He did not want to hurt the two incredibly generous and supportive people who rescued him from a Dickensian existence filled with poverty, hunger and potential abuse after being taken to a big-city facility for homeless street children. Being adopted as an infant myself, I know that feeling all too well, which is why I still refer to my mother and father who raised me simply as “my parents,” with no qualifier.
But that is topped soon after by a revelation shared by Sue, a tower of maternal tenderness and immense devotion embodied by Nicole Kidman, who is excellent despite a distractingly awful curly red wig. She uses the occasion to finally explain to Saroo exactly why she and his father, John (David Wenham, best known as Faramir in “The Lord of Rings”), decided to adopt him. Kidman, herself an adoptive mother of two, delivers her words with such nakedly honest emotion, all the Kleenex in the world won’t stop the ensuing flood.
Not that you need to be adopted to be so touched. After all, the primal fear of suddenly becoming lost and separated from those you care about most is a universal one. The first 40 minutes or so of “Lion” preys upon such anxiety, heightened by its visually poetic boy’s-eye-view camera work by Greig Fraser, in a way that anyone can relate.
What is truly amazing is that the lion’s share of the acting during this early stage is by a untrained newcomer, Mumbai native Sunny Pawar, who won the part after thousands of children were screen-tested. The kid is a natural, equal parts waif and rascal with an expressive face that perfectly reflects his state of mind from scene to scene while often not saying word. Nothing against Patel, who has grown immensely as a performer, but without the groundwork laid by little Sunny, “Lion’s ” onscreen roar would definitely be more than a bit muted.
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