lion movie analysis essay

Lion | Movie Analysis

Film review of lion : a search for identity and a yearning to belong.

Lion  (2017) traverses the life of a 5-year-old Saroo Brierley as he experiences separation from his family, survives the streets of a city he doesn’t even speak the language of, gets adopted by a loving Australian family, and finally embarks on a journey to find his birth home and family. This movie revolves around themes of identity, parenthood, adoption, and cultural heritage.

Watch the trailer of Lion here:

LION  | Summary and Analysis

The movie spans 25 years of a boy named Saroo Brierley who lives in extreme poverty while helping his mother carry rocks while helping his brother steal coal pieces from moving trains. Saroo idolizes his brother, who is like a cool superhero in the wonderous eyes of a small child. His brother, Guddu, jumps on and off trains, gets coal pieces and produces miracle foods, such as milk and jalebis. One day, Saroo in his ecstasy of joining his brother in one of his ventures, falls asleep at a train station and on finding his brother absent, he steps onto a train but that train happens to be decommissioned and Saroo is trapped in the moving train, bound for an unknown destination. Saroo’s dawning realization that he is alone and trapped is accompanied by desperate shouts for his brother who is not to come. “Guddu!!” These visceral screams are cut off by a shot of the outside, the turmoil of a lost child is contrasted with the serene landscape and a moving train. The camerawork by the talented Greig Fraser smartly pans the camera to show the vastness of the world and the smallness of a lost child.

Saroo arrives in Kolkata, the bustling city filled with unknown people who speak an indecipherable language (Saroo speaks Hindi, whereas people speak Bengali in Kolkata). Saroo’s perspective is explored throughout his survival on the streets of Kolkata that do not care for a homeless and poor child. Human traffickers and child predators roam the same streets and almost capture Saroo at every turn of the road. Yet, the brave child Saroo is, he escapes the predatory hands of these beings. A year later, he is adopted by a loving Australian couple, Sue and John, who take him in and shower him with all the love in the world. A brush with jalebis brings to the surface lost memories and Saroo embarks on a journey to retrace his steps to his birthplace.

Dev Patel plays the older Saroo in search of his home through a harrowing journey spanning multiple hours on Google Maps and a complex maze of memories. The cinematography looks into the wandering eyes of Saroo and the roads and images he follows home. The camera pans from the blurry images on the screen to the vivid and sometimes hazy memories that Saroo retains from his childhood. The pacing of the movie takes the audience along with Saroo as he navigates the vastness of the world to find an identity. The audience doesn’t realize the destination that they’re hurtling towards, only a building tension and desperation that haunts Saroo and transforms him into a person that is looking for a place to belong. Adult Saroo’s haunting eyes and his need for a home are paralleled with the child Saroo’s survival through the streets of Kolkata. The audience is sharply and constantly reminded of the tough landscape that Saroo had to survive.

Dev Patel brilliantly plays the mature and more sensitive role of Adult Saroo. However, this would be groundless without the child actor, Sunny Pawar, whose big eyes contain the world and hope regardless of any obstacle that may come his way. Young Saroo sees everything and understands all that is happening. His sensitivity and empathy toward other people alert his survival instincts when to act and when to run away. The steadfast and sturdy nature of this young boy is both devastating and heartening to witness. This direction lets the movie unfold without the extreme melodrama of a child being tortured by his surroundings. Garth Davis weaves a rich tapestry of the determination of a young man in finding his home and finding a place in this wide, wide world to call home. 

In the search for his birth mother and the existence of an adoptive mother, Saroo is now torn with the guilt of turning his back on his adoptive parents who gave him a future and raised him with so much love and adoration. The movie expertly grapples with the theme of adoption and ethnicity, along with the estrangement Sue, played beautifully by Nicole Kidman, feels with her son, Saroo. The delicate balance between adoption and parenthood unfolds over the course of the story. Saroo talks with his mother about how he feels having to adopt two kids deprived her of raising her own kids, the “blank slates” they would have been, instead, she was burdened with two strange kids with even stranger pasts. Sue’s confession about why she adopted Saroo and Mantosh would leave a shaking imprint on the viewer’s heart with the sheer spirituality of it. The act of adoption transcends the mere need for children and enters the realm of understanding and a human need to break away from abusive parenthood. The mere words, “we chose to have you,” shakes the entire foundation of the adoption industry. The act of adoption accompanied not by a need to adopt one because of a lack of choice, but by choice, by free will, provides new insight into the world of parenthood. 

After the reconciliation with his parents, Saroo sets out for India, for the home he unknowingly left behind. The audience holds their breath at this point, as this is the moment the movie was building towards. Saroo is sceptical about whether he will be able to meet his family again or not. By some motherly instinct, Saroo’s mother stayed in that area for all these years. The reunion is as much a tear-jerker as it can be. This is short-lived as he is told that the brother he was dreaming about meeting no longer exists in the world. However, the simple act of embracing his mother and telling her that he is alive and well is a cathartic process that Saroo needed in his life. Saroo, now finally at peace with his inner child, calls his mother, Sue, on the phone to tell her that all is well. The knowledge that her son was safe all these years is enough for Shekila and that brings closure to an entire age of turmoil. The movie ends with real footage from the real Saroo Brierley as it is shown to the audience that he brought both of his mothers together in a subversive act of reclaiming his past and future.

The title is apt to the story and journey of Saroo. In a maze of survival and finding a home, Saroo doesn’t even know his name properly but emulates it perfectly. Sheru, it turns out, is the name of this child with lion-like perseverance and bravery. The story comes full circle and ends on a note of pure joy and healing.

The only undercurrent that the director failed to explore properly is the character of Lucy, Saroo’s unconditionally supportive girlfriend, played by the actor Rooney Mara. The actor’s potential doesn’t get explored much as she is relegated to the role of a girlfriend who listens and understands her boyfriend perfectly. Saroo might not have been able to traverse this rocky terrain by himself, but it doesn’t get translated properly enough into gratitude towards Lucy.

Lion won the Oscars and awards along with the hearts of the audience with its striking portrayal of what it means to belong, and the central theme of identity, parenthood, adoption, and cultural heritage.

– Shreya Singla

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How 'Lion' explores identity, belonging and cultural heritage

20 Jan 2017 BY Kirsten Geekie in Film Features

An unimaginable true story brought to life,  Lion   is an affecting yet life-affirming human drama about a young Indian boy who finds himself thousands of miles from home. Separated from his family for more than 25 years, the boy eventually attempts to find his way back home to his birth mother.

Lion (2016)

105 reviews

Drama based on the true story of a young Indian boy who gets lost from his family and, many years later as an adult, retraces his steps to find them.

Age group 11+ years

Duration 118 mins

As a young boy, Saroo and his family lived in a rural village in northern India. Reduced to stealing coal to exchange for food with locals, his older brother Guddu would often head to a neighbouring town to find work. One evening, five year-old Saroo followed Guddu and waited for him to finish at the train station. While waiting, he wandered into an empty train and fell asleep, only to awaken with the train in motion, hurtling him far away from home. Terminating more than 1,500 miles away in Kolkata - a strange, frantic city, whose language he didn't speak - Saroo is lost in a seemingly hopeless situation. Narrowly avoiding being kidnapped, and with no paper trail or family name, he ended up in a local orphanage, from where he was eventually adopted by a couple in Australia, starting a new life on another continent.

The first feature film from Australian director Garth Davis, Lion is a film of two halves. Opening with the little boy's alarming journey into the dangerous melee of Kolkata, the first act immerses you in Saroo's experience. Alone and bewildered, the camera stays close to him, following him up and down the train as he screams for help. Deposited in Kolkata, the camera then draws out, revealing his small, vulnerable body set agains the huge crowds and unfamiliar landscapes of the big city. Overlooked and unable to ask for help (Saroo speaks Hindi, while the language in Kolkata is Bengali) he is destined to become one of the many street urchins that inhabit the city's alleyways and archways. Reminiscent of  Slumdog Millionaire 's frenzied, heady depiction of the slums of Mumbai, Lion  puts you right there with Saroo, navigating the dark, murky underbelly of the city. 

Incredibly, Saroo survives the streets, and is sent to live with an adoptive family in Australia. Travelling to his new home in Tasmania, the film allows you a sigh of relief as the camera gently lingers on scenes of Saroo safe in the hands of his new adopted parents, mutely coming to terms with his new life. As he settles in, Saroo is joined by Mantosh, another Indian boy, who becomes Saroo's adopted brother. However, Mantosh struggles to assimilate to his new surroundings as comfortably as Saroo.

Where the first half of the film follows Saroo as a young boy, tossed around by the hands of fate, the second half transitions to 25 years later, with Saroo a university student in Australia. As an adult, Saroo is embracing the next phase of his life, with memories of his time in India lying dormant. Until, that is, at a party, when the smell of freshly made Jalebi - an Indian sweet - triggers old memories. This leads to a discussion of family and identity that comes to govern Saroo's journey throughout the rest of the film. Inspired by the development of Google Earth, Saroo becomes obsessed with retracing his steps back to the family he left behind. Only his long-buried memories can tell him if he is on the right path amongst the countless possibilities in the sprawling geographical radius.

For British actor Dev Patel, who plays adult Saroo, this is a film about love and the remarkable bond between mother and son transcending continents. Through tender memories, we see young Saroo working with his birth mother Kamla in the hills behind their village. The more Saroo scours Google Earth for clues to the whereabouts of his village, the more vivid the memories become, and the more his love for his mother is reignited. Meanwhile, we're shown the quiet dedication that his adopted parents have provided and the deep bond he has formed with his adopted mother, even if Saroo cant bring himself to tell them of his investigations for fear of hurting them and seeming ungrateful.

The film throws light on the sensitive issues around adoption and the motivations of parents who adopt children from different countries and cultures to their own. All the while, Saroo's relationship with Mantosh becomes increasingly strained - not helped by not knowing what became of Guddu. Acutely aware that Saroo's life would be very different if he hadn't been adopted, his memories wont let you forget that it was simply an unthinkable event that cruelly drew them apart.

Torn between two families in two different countries, landscape becomes a defining motif in Saroo's struggle to understand who he really is. Gliding aerial shots of the Australian countryside are compared to the rugged plains of India that Saroo's train travelled across. Director Garth Davis and Dev Patel both spent months travelling through India in order to help them emotionally connect with the story. Saroo's childhood memories revolve around the earthy hills he worked on with his mother, while as an adult he runs into the rugged wilderness of Tasmania for space to think, revealing the innate association he has with both worlds.

This conflict of identity is brought to the fore by a deeply affecting performance from Dev Patel. Through eight months of research, he perfected the Australian accent, travelled India, and even met with the real life Saroo. Similarly, 8-year-old Sunny Pawar is transfixing as young Saroo, despite having never acted before. As a more established actor, Nicole Kidman strikes a poignant chord as his agonised adoptive mother, torn between her love and his needs.

A real story told with raw and absorbing truth Lion is an important story with a huge heart that provokes fundamental questions around identity, belonging and cultural heritage.

Explore the themes of Lion further with our Into Film Recommends podcast below, or  log in to SoundCloud to download the podcast and listen on the go . 

The  Into Film Recommends Podcast Series is also available on iTunes .

Kirsten Geekie , Film Curation Manager

MA (Hons) in English Literature & Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow with a background in Film Festivals having worked for Edinburgh International Film Festival, Sheffield Doc Fest and BFI London Film Festival.

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“Lion” sneaks up on you as it proceeds to pluck your heart strings with its little cat feet. Then, before you know it, tear ducts will be brimming and your entire being will be awash with incredible joy but also a splash of bittersweet sorrow. At least that is what happened to those around me during the course of this incredible true story about a five-year-old Indian boy named Saroo, whose life is changed in 1986 after being separated from his idolized older brother, ending up more than a thousand miles from his home and family.

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.

In fact, the key relationship is the one the young Saroo shares with his adored older brother, Guddu (an engaging Abhishek Bharate), that is established right off the bat. While their hard-working single mother watches over their sister, the pair goes off to steal coal from trains to trade for milk. One night, Saroo begs Guddu to take him on his rounds as he sneaks onto empty trains for dropped money and other lost items. But they become separated after Saroo falls asleep on a station-platform bench. When he awakes, he panics after finding himself alone and boards a locomotive that suddenly begins to move and doesn’t stop until it arrives in the bustling city of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). 

Saroo can’t speak the local language—Bengali as opposed to Hindi—and he can’t even pronounce the name of his village correctly. Eventually, he is reduced to sleeping in tunnels and stealing food from public shrines. But somehow his innate street smarts kick in, allowing Saroo to survive long enough to be happily rescued from a potentially dire fate.

The later portion of the film that unfolds after Saroo is adopted can’t compete with such a compelling opening, but by then we are fully invested in what will happen to this now grown man. As Patel takes over the role, we see a bright and confident Saroo enroll in a hospitality course in Melbourne and fall for a fellow classmate (a mostly wasted Rooney Mara in supportive girlfriend mode). The one downside is when his parents also adopt a much more traumatized and distant Indian lad to be his new brother, a stark contrast to his deep trusting bond with Guddu. All it takes is a run-in with an Indian fried-dough treat known as jalebis served at a party to eventually ignite Saroo’s hunger to reconnect with his roots. 

That search requires Patel to brood, stroke his beard and obsessively sit in front of a computer as his apartment walls increasingly look like a detective’s patchwork paper-trail of photos and other clues to a puzzle—not exactly high drama. But all is forgiven when his memory clicks in and his hard work pays off beautifully. Let’s just say if you are human, there is no way that “Lion” won’t move you. 

Susan Wloszczyna

Susan Wloszczyna spent much of her nearly thirty years at USA TODAY as a senior entertainment reporter. Now unchained from the grind of daily journalism, she is ready to view the world of movies with fresh eyes.

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Film credits.

Lion (2016)

Rated PG-13 for thematic material and some sensuality.

129 minutes

Dev Patel as Saroo Brierley

Rooney Mara as Lucy

Nicole Kidman as Sue Brierley

David Wenham as John Brierley

Pallavi Sharda as Prama

Benjamin Rigby as Waiter

Eamon Farren as Luke

Lucy Moir as Lucy's Friend

• Garth Davis

Written (based on the novel by)

• Saroo Brierley

Writer (based on the novel by)

• Larry Buttrose
• Luke Davies

Cinematographer

• Greig Fraser
• Alexandre de Franceschi
• Volker Bertelmann
• Dustin O'Halloran

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Deep Focus: Lion

By Michael Sragow on December 1, 2016

Lion tells the harrowing fact-based story of a 5-year-old boy from an impoverished hamlet in central India who gets separated from his older brother after a train ride to a nearby city and winds up at the chaotic Howrah Station in Kolkata (the former Calcutta), roughly 1600 kilometers away. Unable to read or write or to speak Bengali dialect or even to provide his mother’s or his own correct name, he rebounds from the teeming city’s mean streets to a Dickensian orphanage and from there to a loving home on the Australian island of Tasmania, with his adoptive parents Sue and John Brierley (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham). A nail-biter with no artificiality, filled with sentiment that elicits honest tears, Lion becomes a stirring quest movie when the grownup Saroo Brierley (Dev Patel) embraces a wave of primal feeling and resolves to find his hometown and his birth family.

The director, Garth Davis (who made four episodes of Jane Campion’s miniseries, Top of the Lake ), and the screenwriter, Luke Davies (also a novelist and poet), have used adjectives like “epic” and “mythical” to describe their attraction to the material. The movie does exert a visceral pull and surrounds audiences with its spaciousness and sweep, but I think its accomplishment goes deeper. Davies wrote a script grounded in the experience of the 5-year-old, Saroo (Sunny Pawar), letting his tragedy unroll from the boy’s own perspective. When Davis read it (as he told The Hollywood Reporter ), “ Wall-E was somehow floating around in my head — that little robot wandering around that post-apocalyptic landscape.” Working close to their instincts and at the peak of their abilities, the filmmakers intimately chart the growth of a character’s awareness from a child battered by events to an adult who welds together mightily different aspects of his life.

Lion does exactly what the movie version of this real-life saga (based on Brierley’s memoir, A Long Way Home ) should do. It demonstrates the power of an individual to reclaim his past and to merge legacies from two different cultures. Because it’s cathartic and optimistic, it also leaves us remarkably clearheaded.

Saroo refers just once to a brother named Kallu, but the filmmakers ignore that character and merely touch on his sister Shekila in order to concentrate on Saroo’s closest sibling, Guddu (Abhishek Bharate), and their mother, Hamla (Priyanka Bose), who works as a laborer, moving rocks on construction sites. Davis and Davies focus the material without distorting it. While weaving their own sturdy visual mesh, these storytellers immerse us in the boys’ world and tie us to their fraternal bond. The credit sequence is like a lyrical overture: the camera floats above Tasmania’s dramatic shoreline, then hovers over treetops that could be from Australia or India before lighting down on the arid, hilly landscape of Saroo’s native turf. Saroo is roaming through a valley filled with butterflies, and when he raises his arms in delight, it’s as if he’s making a blessing or a prayer. Soon Guddu comes calling, and the pair hop a train to steal some coal. To Saroo, Guddu is a hero, able to outwit guards and soldiers, defiantly standing upright on a coal car as the train enters a tunnel. Early on, without the self-conscious use of a subjective camera, the filmmakers insinuate Saroo’s perspective, mixing shots taken from his close-to-the ground eye-line with medium shots of him and Guddu and far wider views that stun us with the challenges of survival these boys face every day. By the time they take the fateful trip that will alter their destinies, we share their pulsing connection and Saroo’s fright when it’s severed.

Lion goes beyond the feel-good climaxes of its inspirational genre. The filmmakers use their own complex sensibilities to convey the birth of one complicated consciousness. What makes Lion extraordinary is the director’s gift for expressing confusion and blurred states of being, for what people do when they’re not thinking and for what they remember without trying. Because of the magic Davis works with Pawar as young Saroo, we understand why the boy, after pleading to accompany Guddu on a nocturnal expedition (sweeping underneath train seats for abandoned goods and change, then scavenging and begging for work for as long as a week), would be so elated and exhausted that he simply falls asleep at their destination. When Saroo awakens on a platform bench, he doesn’t wait for his brother, as instructed, but in a panic, crying out for Guddu, he clambers into an empty car on a train that resembles the one he took before. When the engine starts up, he’s unable to get out, and Davis keeps his camera locked in with Saroo so we comprehend his escalating distress and dislocation.

This long ride is the beginning of a journey that ought to be called an odyssey. It’s a modern odyssey, though, equally physical and psychological. As the action ripples out from India to Australia and then flows back again, Saroo burrows deep within himself to find out where he fits in and who he is. Because of Davis’s and Pawar’s supple grip on Saroo’s resilient character, the movie never sinks into “misery porn.” We get to know Pawar’s big-eyed, luminous face so well that he’s able to convey with the slightest shift of expression when Saroo knows that adults, including one who insidiously cozies up to him, are up to no good. Saroo’s sensitivity is a source of strength. The filmmakers simultaneously test him and reveal his sturdy fiber, so they can portray, say, his escape from mysterious adults who round up a gang of street urchins, or his response to a boy in an orphanage class who bangs his head against the wall, without hyperbole or melodrama.

Lion contains more than one head-banger. After Saroo settles into his Tasmanian home, the big-hearted Brierleys adopt a brother for him, Mantosh, who responds violently to direction or discipline, and then punishes himself. The film trains a penetrating eye on the challenges and heroism of adoptive parents, and Kidman, in a brilliantly layered performance, stands up to the close scrutiny. She establishes Sue’s tender bond with Saroo from the moment she gazes at him with maternal rapture when cleaning him up in his first bath. In a fluid acting partnership, Kidman and Patel sustain their intimacy when the narrative jumps ahead 25 years.

The casting of Patel is almost too good to be true. The actor who burst on the scene in Slumdog Millionaire , as a gutter-bred teenager exploiting every piece of knowledge he has gleaned to win a game show, and then anchored two crowd-pleasing films as the manager of the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, here grows into a confident, take-charge man who is pursuing a degree in (what else?) hotel management. Patel displays his acting mettle when Saroo’s past breaks into his consciousness on tides of recovered memory. Saroo develops an unstoppable desire to find the hometown he knows only by a child’s phonetic rendering, and to locate what’s left of his original family. (He keeps it from his Australian parents.) Few actors have brought more dynamism or texture to a “haunted” character than Patel does in this role. And Kidman matches Patel with a radiant dignity. As Saroo becomes increasingly obsessed, shutting out his Australian family and the most understanding girlfriend imaginable (Rooney Mara), Sue refuses to honor his guilt-clouded presumptions that adopting two Indian children has ruined her life. Saroo is not the only character with a sense of destiny. Kidman turns Sue’s devotion to adoptive parenthood, and her confession to Saroo of a revelation she had in adolescence—a variation on the book’s account of a “vision” that “left her feeling like an electric shock had gone through her”—into a moment of genuine transcendence and clarity. Patel answers her acting challenge with his own formidable powers of belief.

The greatest liberty the filmmakers take is to depict Saroo’s resurgent memory as the result of a Proustian moment: while socializing with Indians at the international hotel management college, he responds to the look, smell, and touch of an Indian cookie, a jalebi, the way Proust did when he bit into a madeleine. According to Saroo’s memoir, he actually retained and treasured his memories of India throughout his young life; he simply didn’t tell anyone about them until he started talking to his hotel-school classmates. He feared that Sue and John Brierley would reckon that he longed for a family love they couldn’t give him or for a country that was no longer his own—which is why, in the film, he doesn’t explain to them why he sacrifices so much of his life for a search he conducts on Google Earth.

Even so, this section of Lion is splendid. We realize that the first half of the movie, superb in itself, has also been marvelous preparation for Saroo’s crusade to reclaim his past and make himself whole. The valley filled with butterflies, his bliss with Guddu and the mother he knows only as his ami , the desolation he felt on the train that stranded him in Kolkata, he now sees as part of what makes him him. It’s as if he’s repopulating his own history.

Davis stacks his supporting cast on both continents with aces. Mara brings a clear-eyed sympathy to the underwritten role of Saroo’s lover. Divian Ladwa is volcanically potent as the adult Mantosh Brierley, and Bose, as Saroo’s birth mother, manages to be heartbreakingly eloquent with just a few words.

Lion is dramatically complete. Saroo fills T.S. Eliot’s prescription: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” The film ends with that contemporary movie rarity—an authentic and overwhelming display of gratitude.

Michael Sragow is a contributing editor to Film Comment and writes its Deep Focus column. He is a member of the National Society of Film Critics and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. He also curates “The Moviegoer” at the Library of America website.

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Review by Brian Eggert December 28, 2016

Lion is a true story about a Khandwa-born orphan who grows up in Australia, where he uses Google Earth to locate his biological mother in a densely populated section of India. You may have heard a similar short take on your local news or read about it in the headlines. Or maybe you read the book, A Long Way Home , an autobiographical account of the events, authored by Saroo Brierley and published in 2014. First-time feature director Garth Davis helms the adaptation for The Weinstein Company, based on the screenplay by Luke Davies, and the outcome manages to produce a few tears and moving performances, regardless of the picture’s blatant attempts at feel-good storytelling. And when it’s not obviously vying for Oscar gold or propagandizing for the Google machine, Lion happens to be tender in its consideration of home and family as concepts.

The wonderfully Dickensian first hour follows the five-year-old Saroo (newcomer Sunny Pawar), who lives in a small village with his mother (Priyanka Bose), newborn sister, and older brother, Guddu (Abhishek Bharate). Out looking for work with Guddu one night, Saroo falls asleep on a decommissioned train, which begins moving and doesn’t stop for several days, some 1,600 miles later in Calcutta. Saroo, who only speaks Hindi and not the local Bengali tongue, searches overcrowded train stations for his family. He eventually takes to the streets, where he must avoid an assorted variety of predators. One of them, a seemingly kind woman, gives Saroo a meal and introduces him to a suspicious gentleman, who looks the boy over and says, “He’s exactly what they’re looking for.” Those chillingly vague words are enough to send Saroo back on the run.

When authorities find him, they’re unable to locate Saroo’s family, as the boy is fuzzy on details about his hometown and only knows his mother as “mum.” After a time in an orphanage, he’s adopted by his kindly new parents (David Wenham, Nicole Kidman) in Tasmania, who later adopt Mantosh (Keshav Jadhav), another boy but with severe mental disorders. After more than twenty years, Saroo, now played by Dev Patel, studies to receive a degree in hotel management in Australia and enjoys a romance with a fellow student, Lucy (Rooney Mara). But when he starts recalling his childhood in India, friends tell him about Google Earth, and he embarks on a point-and-click journey into his past. The project takes months and floods Saroo’s memory with aching images. Meanwhile, for reasons that feel amplified for dramatic effect, Saroo pushes away his adoptive family and girlfriend.

Of course, the story ends as happily (if bittersweet) as you might expect. While it’s perhaps too easy to feel cynical about Lion ’s modus operandi as a two-hour product placement for Google Earth, Davies’ dialogue talks about the geobrowser’s functionality in suspicious detail. (Perhaps now is a good time to mention that Davis used to direct commercials.) But no matter how much the film feels like a manipulation of our sympathy for a corporate agenda, the fact remains that it happened, for the most part, and that’s pretty astonishing. The film also looks gorgeous, courtesy of Greig Fraser’s wandering overhead camerawork, as though the photography itself was a better-looking version of Google Earth. Several early sequences of Saroo lost in Calcutta, shot on location, provide the most stirring visual dynamic with the fragile, innocent boy unprotected in a city swarming with mostly indifferent people who do not speak his language.

To be sure, you would have to be inhuman not to have a compassionate reaction to what occurs onscreen. The emotional power of watching Pawar (in perhaps one of the best performances ever by an eight-year-old) navigate the streets alone cannot be bested by Patel’s otherwise affecting scenes of inward pain and feeling misplaced (however un-cinematic they may be). But the adult cast remains impressive. Kidman, stripped of her makeup and botox, looks downright human, complete with the raw power she’s demonstrated in films like Eyes Wide Shut and Birth . Divian Ladwa is also excellent as the damaged, older version of Mantosh. Finally, it’s worth noting that Mara turns on her rarely seen charms as Lucy in an underdeveloped role; she often plays morose or distant characters, at which she excels (see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , Side Effects , Her ), and so it’s a pleasure to see her smile, dance, and flirt.

In a postscript following a few touching shots of the actual Saroo with his Australian and Indian mothers meeting for the first time, titles tell us that over 80,000 children go missing in India every year (a haunting factoid ungainly juxtaposed with a thumping, upbeat, end credits soundtrack). Besides being a human-interest story, Lion also has a humanitarian cause, indirectly calling for viewers to follow the example of Saroo’s adoptive parents: Resist the selfish need to bring a new life into this world, given the countless children already in need around the globe. Whatever self-interest or influence on Lion that Google may have, the message’s power and the generally heart-wrenching quality of the film remains. Similarly, no matter how many feelings the film stirs up, we cannot help but greet it with suspicion through our tears.

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Lion is a well-made melodrama with a rather disturbing message

Lecturer in Media Studies, University of Notre Dame Australia

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Ari Mattes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Lion is a well-made film starring Dev Patel, Rooney Mara, Nicole Kidman and David Wenham. An Australian production written by Luke Davies ( Candy ) and adapted from Saroo Brierly’s memoir A Long Way Home (2013), it follows the remarkable true story of an Indian boy who, lost in Calcutta, is adopted by an Australian couple and grows up in Tasmania. 25 years later, he uses Google Earth to locate his home village and is reunited with his birth mother.

The film is split evenly in two. The first half follows the imperiled Saroo as a young boy (Sunny Pawar) who finds himself lost in the urban nightmare of Calcutta, thousands of kilometres from home. Not speaking the common language of Bengali, he’s unable to converse with anyone.

He ekes out a living as a beggar, narrowly avoiding enslavement as a child prostitute, before winding up in an orphanage, whence he is adopted by Australian couple Sue (Nicole Kidman) and John (David Wenham). In the second half of the film we follow adult Saroo (Dev Patel) as he sets off on his obsessive quest to find his family. On the way he falls in love with Lucy (Rooney Mara).

The technical elements of the film are perfectly realised. The photography balances beautiful, epic shots of the Indian and Tasmanian landscapes with pathos-laden close-ups of the main characters. The score by Volker Bertelmann and Dustin O'Halloran is emotively symphonic without a surplus of schmaltz. Despite the length of the film, the construction of the story is economic enough to maintain the viewer’s interest throughout.

It is an effective, pleasurably melodramatic film – I challenge anyone to see it without reaching for the tissue box. The performances are excellent, with 8-year old Pawar, lighting every scene with his delightful smile, the standout.

Unfortunately, like most commercial films, Lion doesn’t say anything particularly meaningful about the world. In film terms, this is called burbanking: reducing the political problems that form its contextual backdrop to matters of individual psychology and morality.

The opening sequences, with overhead shots of the Indian countryside contrasting with images of a train cutting into it, gesture towards the dialectical relationship between rural poverty and urban development.

However, instead of following this through to its logical conclusion – that is, a critique of capitalist globalisation and its attendant economic inequality – it veers towards sentimentalism, sticking to the saccharine path paved by hundreds of Hollywood “overcoming the odds” pics before it.

A film that is underpinned by the contrast between India’s urban and rural poverty and Australia’s affluence cannot help but be about the processes of capitalist modernity and urbanisation that underpin contemporary consumer culture. Yet Lion eschews any genuine political engagement.

In a sense, this is hardly surprising. But it is particularly notable in Lion because of the film’s ultimate posturing regarding the perilous situation for children in India.

It ends with captions telling us that “Over 80,000 children go missing in India each year”, before pointing towards the virtues of Western adoption of Indian children. It’s certainly one of the more explicitly Orientalist visions I’ve seen on the big screen this year.

The film approaches consciousness of this in one particularly bizarre scene in which Sue tells adult Saroo about the “vision” she had as a twelve year old girl that made her determined to, one day, “have two brown-skinned boys.” She’s in tears, and Saroo hugs her, with the emotional charge of the scene negating its critical potential. What should appear creepy – a 12-year old girl’s bio-colonial fantasy – is transformed into a tender familial moment.

Of course, a commercial, mainstream film like Lion is hardly going to undermine its own basis by critiquing global capitalism, and, as a romantic melodrama, it is very effective. But as a film about what is a political issue (which its final “message” seems to indicate it thinks it is) it falls hopelessly short.

It is, in fact, rather hypocritical in its depiction of poverty as the result of some kind of amorphous “evil” and not as the necessary product of capitalist development. There is, moreover, something profoundly Dickensian in its explicit celebration of bourgeois sympathy for the poor – and its solution: physical appropriation of the poor by the rich.

Lion opens in Australia on January 19.

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The circle of life, identity and self-discovery, family and community.

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Lion (2016 Film)

By garth davis, lion (2016 film) quotes and analysis.

"I'm adopted, I'm not really Indian." Saroo

During a group meeting at school in Melbourne, Saroo is asked where he is from and responds that he is from Calcutta. When another member asks where exactly, Saroo cannot answer as he does not know, and responds that he's not really Indian. This encounter sets up the question of who Saroo "really" is and where he is from, which is something that he will set to work trying to figure out for the remainder of the film.

"I had another family. A mother. A brother. I can still see their faces" Saroo

Saroo says this to Lucy, his girlfriend, when he realizes that he had a whole life in India that he barely remembers.

"What if you do find home and they're not even there? Then you just keep searching?" Lucy

Lucy asks Saroo this as a hypothetical question to try and understand what exactly he is trying to figure out about his past.

"Hi, mum. I know you will be sound asleep. I just want to say that I'm safe. Safe and all the questions have been answered. There are no more dead ends. I found my mother, and... she thanks you both for raising me. She understands that you are my family. She's... happy, just knowing I'm alive. I found her, but that doesn't change who you are. I love you mom... so much. And you, Dad. And Mantosh. Saroo!" Saroo

This is the message that Saroo leaves on Sue and John's answering machine after he finds his biological mother. He communicates to them that, even though it is extremely important that he has found his biological mother, he thinks of them as his parents, since they raised him, and there is no complication in that arrangement. Here, Saroo articulates his gratitude to his adoptive parents.

"We chose not to have kids. We wanted the two of you. That's what we wanted. We wanted the two of you in our lives.That's what we chose. That's one of the reasons I fell in love with your dad. Because we both felt as if... the world has enough people in it. Have a child, couldn't guarantee it will make anything better. But to take a child that's suffering like you boys were. Give you a chance in the world. That's something." Sue

When Saroo becomes discouraged in his search for his family, he talks to Sue about the fact that it must have been difficult raising two children who were not really her own. She tells him that this is not the case at all, that she and John chose to adopt even though they could have had children.

"Please could you not do anything while I'm away to make mum more unhappy than you already do?" Saroo

Saroo says this to his troubled adoptive brother, Mantosh, on the eve of his departure for college. He tells Mantosh not to upset their mother while he is away at college, and rather scornfully suggests that Mantosh only makes their mother unhappy.

"You weren't just adopting us but our past as well. I feel like we're killing you." Saroo

Saroo says this to Sue, expressing his guilt at how he and Mantosh have made her life harder. He thinks of them both as burdens, Indian children with troubled pasts that have made Sue miserable.

“I want to run a hotel so that I can put all the profits in my pocket.” Saroo

At college in Melbourne, Saroo proves to be rather cocky in one of his classes. He brags that he is going into the hotel business exclusively to make money, and the other students laugh at his playful arrogance.

“Saroo, I really hope she’s there. She needs to see how beautiful you are.” Sue

After Saroo tells Sue his plans to find his birth mother, she says this, a blessing for his journey and an affirmation of who he is.

"You've come a long way, haven't you, little one?" Sue

Sue says this to the young Saroo when they first meet. She notes that he has come from very far, and shows her sensitivity to the intensity of his experience.

Lion (2016 Film) Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Lion (2016 Film) is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

How does the director use a range of techniques to develop empathy for certain characters in the movie

Although I liked the movie, this is only a short answer space. Check this out:

https://variety.com/2016/artisans/production/lion-cinematographer-1201935242/

Saroo is the protagonist of the story. He vanishes from his village after getting separated from his brother at a train station. Living by his wits, Saroo is able to stay out of harm's way, and eventually gets adopted and moves to Tasmania, where...

What is it like for Saroo to live in the orphanage?

The orphanage is a difficult place to live. They cut Saroo's hair and show him a bed in a giant room filled with beds. He worries that he will never leave, and witnesses mistreatment of the children by the adults in charge. One boy, who clearly...

Study Guide for Lion (2016 Film)

Lion (2016 Film) study guide contains a biography of director Garth Davis, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Lion (2016 Film)
• Lion (2016 Film) Summary
• Character List
• Director's Influence

Essays for Lion (2016 Film)

Lion (2016 Film) essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Lion (2016 Film), directed by Garth Davis.

• How Loss Is Presented in Garth Davis' Lion and Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo

Wikipedia Entries for Lion (2016 Film)

• Introduction