‘Lion’ review: Effective tearjerker

Oggs Cruz

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‘Lion’ review: Effective tearjerker
'The film efficiently puts its audience in an unfamiliar world where there is no premium to childhood innocence'

There’s a scene in Garth Davis’ Lion that exemplifies both the film’s biggest strength and its weakness. It happens near the end, where Saroo (Dev Patel), after spending years wrestling with a painful past, finally figures out where his hometown is, with the help of Google Earth. 

Emotional crest

Screengrab from YouTube/Movieclips Trailers

The scene isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but it is the emotional crest of Davis’ film.

An ingeniously woven montage of a teary-eyed Saroo, pixelated images of rural India as captured by satellite, and lyrically staged memories from Saroo’s impoverished but happier childhood, the scene sums up exactly what Lion is: an inspiring story that shrouds its being an internet-era platitude with bells and whistles.

That isn’t exactly a bad thing.

The film efficiently puts its audience in an unfamiliar world where there is no premium to childhood innocence. It takes them along an incredible journey that starts out with a hapless boy getting separated from his family and ends with a heartwarming reunion where everything is resolved, at least from an emotional point of view. It does what it sets out to do, which is to cinematically project a true-to-life tale where the human spirit triumphs against the most daunting of adversities.

 

A certain literariness

Screengrab from YouTube/Movieclips Trailers

The film is most compelling during its first half where Davis concentrates squarely on the plot of young Saroo (Sunny Pawar), who finds himself miles away from his mother and older brother when he sleeps aboard a decommissioned train that takes him all the way to crowded Calcutta.

Almost bereft of dialogue, Davis propels both story and sentiment through clever visuals. He maximizes the smallness and vulnerability of his protagonist, often framing him in the middle of crowds, immense structures, or empty spaces perhaps to evoke exactly how exposed and fragile the little boy is in a world that is infinitely bigger than him. As Saroo moves from one place to another, the hope of him ever seeing his family again woefully diminishes.

There’s a certain literariness to this true story, and Davis and screenwriter Luke Davies smartly exploit that.

As the first half of the film ends with Saroo being adopted by a kind-hearted Australian couple (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham), Davis starts to awkwardly attempt to deepen the drama. Lion deliberately slows down, reintroducing Saroo no longer as the kid whose sole mission is to find his way home but as an adult whose unaccomplished childhood goal is coming back to haunt him, compelling him to use modern technology to restart his search.

It is this almost abrupt transition from the taut and tense first half into the more reflective second half that lessens the film’s power. All of a sudden, everything is muddled by sideplots, from Saroo’s aimless romance with his college classmate (Rooney Mara) to the half-baked rivalry with a less successful sibling.

Screengrab from YouTube/Movieclips Trailers

Yet it is all understandable. Davis and Davies have only the story about a man waiting for technology to catch up to be able to find his family to work with, and the film needs to be more than that. It needs to be about other things, other lives, and other conflicts. It just so happens that Lion prefers its preoccupation with Saroo’s adult dilemmas as diversions to the main plot rather than accessories to complete the whole picture.

Hard to dismiss

Screengrab from YouTube/Movieclips Trailers

Even with all its problems, the overall effect of Lion is hard to dismiss.

It is a grand tearjerker, and Davis admirably recruits everything that he can to expand the improbable but very real tale. He turns it into a portrait of humanity’s valuable persistence, even if it really centers on and parades the point-and-click instantaneousness of the internet. – Rappler.com

 

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ ‘Tirad Pass.’ Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema.

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