Garth Davis (2016)
Lion is based on the autobiography of Saroo Brierley, born in 1981 in the Ganesh Talai neighbourhood of Khandwa, Mahya Pradesh, in central India. As the movie tells it, Saroo is separated from his family at the age of five. Searching at a railway station for his elder brother Guddu, Saroo boards a train, falls asleep and, two days later, finds himself lost in Calcutta. He’s unable to understand the Bengali spoken there or to make himself understood (his native tongue is a Hindi dialect). After spending time with street kids and wandering around the city, he’s taken in by a seemingly well-meaning woman but begins to suspect her ulterior motives and runs away. He spends three months in a Calcutta orphanage before being flown out to Tasmania, to be adopted by a childless Australian couple, Sue and John Brierley. These events make up the first half of Garth Davis’s film (which has a screenplay by Luke Davies, adapted from A Long Way Home, the memoir that Saroo Brierley wrote with Larry Buttrose). A ‘twenty years later’ indicator then whizzes the narrative forward to the start of Saroo’s higher education in Melbourne; his adult relationships, with his adoptive parents and brother, and a fellow-student girlfriend; and his persistent attempts, through Google Earth, to trace his Indian home and renew contact with his family there.
It’s refreshing to see a non-Asian film-maker give India a look different from the cornucopia-of-colour familiar from Slumdog Millionaire and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. The cinematographer Greig Fraser uses predominantly earth tones, in which the occasional patches of vivid colour are striking. The landscape around Ganesh Talai looks intractably parched; it’s here that Saroo’s mother (Priyanka Bose), abandoned by her husband and with four children to raise, labours on building sites each day in the hot sun, carrying rocks on her head. The child Saroo (Sunny Pawar) insists on accompanying Guddu (Abishek Bharate) to the city of Khandwa, where the elder brother looks for work. The pair are separated when Guddu leaves the little boy to rest on a seat in the railway station. The station is pretty deserted: even this is different – from the standard hubbub you’ve come to expect from Indian urban locations on screen. But the opening forty-five or so minutes of Lion are strong chiefly because of Sunny Pawar. We see from an early stage that Saroo is intrepid and resourceful. He goes through so much during his months in Calcutta that it’s easy to believe that he takes his first plane journey, to another continent, in his stride. As well as being sparky and funny, Sunny Pawar suggests, with very few words, the onset of Saroo’s worry and sadness that he can’t get home to Ganesh Talai (he doesn’t know how the place name is spelt and pronounces it ‘Ganestalay’). Anxiety (almost necessarily unspoken given the language problem) seems to settle on Saroo – after a while, to become part of him. Pawar has a documentary purity (although he’s much less camera-conscious than people in documentaries often are). At the same time, he individuates Saroo and Garth Davis does a fine job of helping him to achieve this. The second half of Lion never quite recovers from the disappearance of Sunny Pawar as the focus of attention.
Dramatising the story of the adult Saroo (Dev Patel) is a more complicated matter than describing the events in Khandwa and Calcutta. Lion doesn’t really meet the challenge, although the story is always engaging. The film is sketchy in various ways but chiefly in omitting any sense of what Saroo felt about his past life in India as he was growing up with his adoptive parents (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham): that twenty-year jump forward has a lot to answer for. In a crucial scene late on, Sue Brierley says miserably to Saroo that he doesn’t talk to her anymore. It’s true that he’s keeping secret from Sue and John his Google Earth research but the remark draws attention to the lack of evidence that Saroo ever did talk to Sue about infant experiences which he must remember and have been affected by. It comes as a surprise when Saroo tells his American girlfriend Lucy (Rooney Mara) that not a day goes by without his thinking about his birth mother and knowing that she’s still looking for him. If this were true, it would make it all the more incredible his homesickness hadn’t been an issue in his formative years but the film otherwise gives the impression that Saroo hasn’t felt strongly about this until some other students in Melbourne ask about his background and tell him about Google Earth. The Brierleys adopt a second Indian boy a year after Saroo’s arrival in Tasmania. It’s immediately obvious that the child Mantosh (Keshav Jadhav) is emotionally disturbed; he stays that way as an adult (Divian Ladwa) but we don’t learn much more than that about him. Rooney Mara does what she can with Lucy but it’s a perfunctory role. When Saroo tells her he’s finally located Ganesh Talai on Google Earth, he begs Lucy to ‘wait for me’ as he sets off for India; she is never mentioned or seen again.
The character of Sue Brierley is a different problem. Nicole Kidman plays her with remarkable emotional precision and the tension she gives Sue is a shot in the arm to more than one scene. The impression of a woman determinedly cheerful and ingratiating but sad inside culminates in the moment when Sue, going through a bad patch with both her adopted sons but still putting a deceptive brave face on things, tells Lucy ‘I’ve been blessed’ – the words contradict everything else that Kidman is expressing. That later scene in which Sue suggests that Saroo’s reticence is new in fact provides further evidence to the contrary. Saroo says he’s sorry Sue couldn’t have a child of her own; Sue, astonished, tells him that there was no biological problem but that she and her husband decided it was more socially responsible, in an overpopulated world, to adopt two children in need of parents. As soon as this was revealed, I felt that Nicole Kidman and Garth Davis had been deliberately encouraging the audience to make the same assumption that Saroo had made. From this point onwards, I couldn’t make sense of the melancholy heft of Kidman’s impressive performance.
This has landed her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress and Harvey Weinstein has again proved his talents as an Academy Awards fixer by successfully pushing Dev Patel for a Best Supporting Actor nomination, even though Patel has the lion’s share of Lion. It’s unkind but not wholly unfair to suggest that Weinstein’s task was made easier because Dev Patel remains an underwhelming presence – he doesn’t dominate proceedings. He’s conscientious and likeable yet there is, as usual, a sense that Patel is doing what he’s been told to do. The script’s thin characterisation of Saroo doesn’t help him much. The adult Saroo first appears emerging from the sea in a wet suit – the first of several early hints that he’s become a proper Aussie. In a group of freshers asked to summarise what they want to get out of their hotel management studies, Saroo says brashly that he means to make plenty of money owning hotels. (Dev Patel’s screen past in this line of work makes his course choice rather comical.) I liked it that in the conversation in which he first hears about Google Earth, it’s other Asian students who talk excitedly, and somewhat insensitively, about what the product can and can’t do. But the Australianised parts of Saroo’s personality disappear once his search for ‘Ganestalay’ is underway and he’s purely a deracinated Indian: there’s not enough conflict between his past and his present. Still, it feels right that, when he eventually locates his birthplace on Google Earth, it’s Sunny Pawar whom Garth Davis shows running home in Saroo’s mind. The online moment of discovery links the Google Earth images well to the overhead shots of the landscape at the start of the film.
The impact of the infant Saroo, with his funny, idiosyncratic gait, dashing homewards makes the adult Saroo’s arrival at Ganesh Talai something of an anti-climax. Garth Davis does well, however, at a crucial point of this episode, briefly to turn off Dustin O’Halloran and Hauschka’s obvious (though often effective) music for Lion: Saroo and his mother approach each other in silence. You’d need a heart of stone not to respond to this meeting (his mother knows it’s Saroo from a childhood scar on his temple) – although what follows is mechanical. Saroo learns that Guddu has died and is distraught; he perks up 100% when he’s introduced to the sister who was a babe in arms when he went missing. The dramatised reunion is emotionally upstaged too by film shown immediately before the closing credits, of a subsequent trip that Saroo Brierley made to Ganesh Talai in 2013, with Sue: the shared embrace with his two mothers is very moving. This postscript also supplies the explanation of the film’s title: Saroo had for years mispronounced his actual given name, Sheru, a diminutive of the Hindi word for lion. This isn’t a great film but I enjoyed it – not least because I happened to see it following a return visit first to La La Land and then to Goodfellas, as well as several evenings on the trot watching a box set of True Detective. It was a relief after these to spend time in the company of screen people who weren’t either swamped by film-making technique or sociopathic, or both.
26 January 2017
