09 February 2017
“LION”
a film by Garth Davies
reviewed by J.R.Thomas
Fashions in film come and go, but it must be approaching the time for a current one to pass – films with opening credits reading: “Based on a true story”; can we (please) soon hope for the rather more comforting (for novelists, anyway): “Total fiction, all made up”? It seems that, for now though, the public cannot be persuaded to part with £16 a seat, and more for premium popcorn and wine in a plastic glass, unless they are about to receive some fact-based insight into life in the raw, the unvarnished uncomfortable unembellished (well, only a little embellished) truth. But having got that off our critical chest, we immediately mitigate our own grumble in praise and warm regard for “Lion”, playing in picture houses throughout the UK. For not only is “Lion” based on a true story, it is apparently a pretty accurate depiction of those true events.
That extends to various unexplained happenings and unresolved loose ends in the movie which are indeed such a feature of real life – and especially so, when as in the present instance, the first half of the tale is seen through the eyes of its central character, Saroo (Sunny Pawar, a most remarkable piece of child acting), a lost Indian boy of five years old.
The core story is simply told. Saroo lives in a remote township in north-west India in poverty, with his mother, his elder brother, Guddu, and younger sister, Shekila.
The boys contribute what they can to the survival of the family; one night Guddu goes looking for work by train to the nearest town, taking Saroo with him. He leaves his brother while he finds some work, enjoining Saroo to stay where he is. The little boy goes to sleep on a bench on the station platform. From now, we see life through Saroo’s eyes; when he wakes up there is no sign of his brother and after searching for him, he gets into a train standing with its doors open. The train moves off, ending up many hours later in Calcutta. After some alarming and inexplicable experiences (this is a small boy’s recollections through his adult memory, remember), Saroo ends up in a children’s home, and is adopted, sight unseen, by an Australian couple, the Brierley’s, (David Wenham and Nicole Kidman). The first time the Brierley’s meet him is when Saroo and his carer land in Australia. They speak no Hindi; he, of course, no English
Cut to twenty five years later. Saroo (now played by Dev Patel) is met again as a successful young professional, living in Tasmania. He is close to his parents; but all is not perfect in this Tasmanian idyll – the Brierley’s other son, also an Indian adoptee, is troubled, isolated, and unhappy. Saroo though is making his way steadily through the Australian dream, but increasingly he wants to understand who he is and where he came from, and to rediscover his biological family.
He does not discuss this with his adoptive parents for fear of upsetting them; his American girlfriend (Rooney Mara) though bears the brunt of his agony and his increasing obsession with the search – much of it done trying to trace his memories on-line via Google Earth. He gives up his job and his obsession begins to overwhelm him. The rest is for you to watch (or read up, if you wish to cheat).
We will say that this is in its bones a happy film; boy in danger turns into fine well rounded young man and a splendid example to us all. But this is no fictional story with a tidy resolution, but the record of real events, a very acute observation of true life; it recognises that lives pass through periods of, sometimes are overwhelmed by, immense sadness. Life for most of us is never entirely a bowl of cherries and one of the great merits of this film is that the reasonably happy and normal existence of one man is seen in the context not only of his own drives and weaknesses, but also of the amazingly difficult and fragile lives of so many. This is particularly so in the first half of the film; seen through five year old eyes we are cheered by the remarkable survival strengths of one boy, which keep him alive, via a combination of instinctive suspicion of what he does not understand and an ability to run fast. But he is one amongst many – and we do not know which of those many, if any, survive, let alone are making successful lives in the remarkable resurgence of India. Even in Tasmania, Saroo’s adopted brother gives us the counterpoint to what disturbed childhoods may do to an adult – and the enormous bravery of those adoptive parents in taking on children of unknown parentage and only vaguely glimpsed formative experiences.
As a story this is perhaps a rather slight tale; a matter of great importance to the protagonists, of course, but sadly too common in a fractured world. But the strength of the film is that it tells two other tales – the importance of identity in everybody’s sense of worth, and the hardship and everyday heartbreak of life in societies where poverty is still commonplace and human life not greatly valued. The film does not dwell overlong on the conditions in which Indian poor and outcasts live – although Saroo’s childhood was in the 1980’s and India has seen remarkable economic and social progress since then, there are still plenty of snakes down which the unfortunate and lost can only too easily slide, into terrible privations. Seeing all this through the eyes of a child and treating such conditions so matter-of-factly, the film points up to us what our fellow citizens of a shrinking world can and do endure much more effectively than many celebrity narrated documentaries. Less can be more; silence can speak loudly. Our western safety nets may be flawed; large parts of India are still to provide any at all.
The film is directed by Garth Davies (an Australian himself) who also wrote the screenplay, adapting the original book by Saroo Brierley. It is Davies’ first film, though he has had a short but distinguished previous career in TV work and advertising. Maybe it is that experience in advertising shorts that enables him to build in such a low key and restrained way this powerful series of punches; certainly it was received with enormous acclaim at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival and has been slowly released, initially in the USA and Canada, and recently in Australia and the UK. It is, in modern terms, a low budget movie, costing around US$12m (though with another Aus$12m paid to Mr Saroo for the film rights to his book) and has already taken three times that in gross receipts. The new President of the USA would certainly approve of such commercial success; it would be nice to think that he might arrange a screening at the White House for him and his team, to give a thoughtful insight into other worlds, other lives.
“Lion” is playing in many London cinemas now
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