In the early 1980's, a young boy named Saroo (Sunny Pawar) is living a small but peaceful life with his mother, younger sister and older brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate), whom he thinks the world of. One night, when accompanying Guddu to his night work, Saroo is separated from his older brother and ends up on a train that takes him a great distance away from his home. He's now stuck in a large city without any adults to turn to and lives a life as a homeless child for months on end. Thankfully, he eventually gets adopted by an Australian couple by the name of Sue (Nicole Kidman) and John (David Wenham), who take the youngster in and it isn't long before the trio grows close to one another.
Now, that in and of itself would be plenty of story for one movie if written properly, but the tale of Saroo getting adopted as a child is basically only the first half of Lion while the second half of the motion picture details Saroo as an adult (now played by Dev Patel), whose got his own ambitions of getting more education and becoming a hotel manager. However, long-buried memories of his youth before he was adopted are triggered in his mind and he soon goes on a hunt that stretches on for multiple years to find his way back home. Now, there's no reason why a tightly-written script could have made all these real-life occurrences work in the confines of one movies, but Lion does bungle the ball quite noticeably in trying to juggle so many events in one sitting.
Events that feel like they should have more impact really don't have time to be as emotionally powerful as they could have been because oh how the screenplay haphazardly tosses out one new development after another at the audience. So much gets thrown at the viewer in such an abrupt or rushed manner, it's hard to really process a number of important plot details. For instance, Saroo strikes up a romance with a fellow student named Lucy (Rooney Mara) and the first shot of them laying in bed together, after having only spent a few casual minutes together, had me mildly puzzled. "Are they a...couple or something now?" I pondered, and sure enough, they are. Lion has just barged right into this aspect of Saroo's life without much in the way of build-up or a proper introduction.
There's all kinds of elements of Lion that just don't get the necessary amount of time to properly work, including Saroo's withdrawal from the rest of the world or the fractured relationship between Saroo and his adopted brother. It's a pity because there are some good actors in here doing solid work, like Dev Patel or especially Nicole Kidman, who enters the movie with a legitimately sweet scene of her introducing herself to a young Saroo and that kind of authentic sweetness is the crux of her strong performance. While we're speaking of actors, it is a pity to note how Rooney Mara, while doing what she can with the part, is just sort of there in the underwritten role of Saroo's girlfriend.
Director Garth Davis makes his narrative feature film directorial debut with Lion and he's decent as a filmmaker, though it feels like the overly sprawling script has gotten the better of him. If only Lion had allowed itself more time to flesh out Saroo's life as an adopted child and adult, it could have been more consistent as a whole and had the rest of the movie match the well-made sequences it begins and ends with. As it stands, it's a decent movie overall with solid cinematography and acting whose script is its real major downfall, Lion manages to cram in so much of Saroo's life into one under two hours long movie at the detriment of creating more dramatically potent material.
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