87% on Rotten Tomatoes
Chloe's thoughts: A must-see; I'm buying the DVD
Watch it if you: Want a heartwrenching biopic that captures the harshness of India and familial separation; Don't mind crying, a lot
Lion tells the story of Saroo Brierley, who at five years old got lost on a train, separating him from his family in a small Indian town. After struggling to survive on his own, he winds up being adopted by an Australian couple. Twenty five years later, though, he resolves to set out and find his family through Google Earth's technology.
I am so glad I was able to watch this film. It came out the day before I left for my holiday and I wasn't able to catch it, but I did see a lot of people posting about it on Facebook, so I made sure to watch it once I got back.
Firstly, I will say that I was quite surprised at how much of the film focused on young Saroo. Pleasantly surprised, though, because this half was the best part of the movie.
It was so shocking and difficult to watch young Saro go missing, and go through all these hardships of survival. The amount of poverty and evildoings that happen on the regular in India are terrifying, with kids being kidnapped (possibly to become beggars for others, organ donors, or sex slaves), people taking advantages of homeless children, and the overall terrible quality of life and lack of concern for orphaned and homeless children. All of this was a struggle and I was on the verge of tears a lot of the time.
The focus on India was much much much longer than I expected, but I am glad that the director decided not to gloss over these aspects of Indian life. The film told what needed to be told. These are real issues; 80,000 children go missing in India every year, and while this is the story of one of them, most of those children's stories remain untold simply because they were not able to survive. The film is aligned with three charities that help children living on the streets, check out more info on the film's website.
The cinematography in this first half of the film is amazing, and Sunny Pawar, who plays the young Saroo, is amazingly talented and also phenomenally adorable! He did a fantastic job even though he had very little dialogue, and was able to communicate through his body and facial expressions, which is a great achievement for a kid, let alone a kid with no acting experience.
Then the second half of the movie focuses on adult Saroo, which was what I originally thought the entire film was going to be about (and now after seeing the film I understand why Dev Patel was nominated as a Supporting Actor).
Dev Patel is amazing in this; his accent sounds so spot on and natural, I was very impressed and even confused, wondering whether he was actually Australian (no, he's from the UK)! In fact, in an interview he said he actually learnt the Aussie accent from watching Australian Masterchef!
Also, when did he suddenly become so handsome???
This second half definitely has its flaws. Unfortunately, they gloss over Saroo's adjusting to Australian life, and also gloss over Mantosh's adjustment, which seemed very interesting and I wish the film was a bit longer so that it could explain and integrate that in a bit better. Also because it seemed like the film was trying to compare and contrast Saroo's relationships with his two brothers, Guddu and Mantosh. It felt like they tried to start that, but then didn't go all the way through with it.
There is also a very dramatic scene with Nicole Kidman that I think could have been done a bit better, and that was the slowest part of the film for me.
Worse still is that apparently, the real life Mantosh and Sue Brierley were not like how the film portrays them, so that's unfortunate because I think they wanted to create more drama to make it more Oscar-worthy, which is sad because I kind of wanted to see more of Saroo's actual searching, rather than his struggles to maintain his family and romantic relationships.
But then we get to the last 20 or so minutes of the film, and my goodness I was getting so worried of running out of tissues (yes, I made it a point to bring tissues because I saw everyone's Facebook posts mentioning how much they cried)!
If I thought the first 1.5 hours were bad, with me trying to blink back tears, slyly wipe away the tears that did fall, and slowly blow my nose whenever the movie started getting louder, boy was I in for a treat!
In the last 20 minutes, everything just came out. Blubbering, heaving, weeping, and just tears. Endless tears.
The performances of Dev Patel and Priyanka Bose here were stunningly beautiful, and I cried like a baby who had just had her heart broken for the first time.
In summary, I came out of the theatre thinking this was one of the best films of the year. While the middle was a bit lacking, the beginning half was phenomenally heartbreaking, and the end climax was a very powerful and touching piece of art due to the entire film's build up, as well as the superb acting abilities of the characters. I think you would be a fool to miss out on this movie.
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