Caught up with Lion, an academy award nominated film releases late last year. Six award nominations, including best picture… I do not agree with that nomination.
This is the true story of a five year old Indian (as in, from India) boy who gets lost, winds up on a train that takes him across the sub-continent to Jakarta where nobody speaks his language, the city is too packed to care about one lost child, and he basically has a bad time of it until he gets adopted by a couple of Australians. Skip forward 25 years and he’s now played by (nominated) Dev Patel who wants to figure out where he came from.
It’s a fine enough story and the child actor is quite good and his portion of the story is harrowing enough. The problem is, once he’s an adult, the movie crashes hard as he struggles to remember where he came from. He uses the newly developed Google Earth to help remember landmarks, he risks his relationship with his girlfriend and adopted mother, and he generally has a bad emotional breakdown. This sequence is needed because (spoiler alert) he does make his way back to India and the film has to earn the emotions it creates in the end… but the movie still fails utterly to make any of that middle part compelling. I’d have chucked the movie out of a window if it hadn’t pulled through in the final act with moving, human moments.
So its hard to recommend the entire movie but if you are looking for an uplifting, tear-jerker of a time, the movie can still work. It’s a tough sell though since it nearly falls apart completely. But, at the end of the film, we get footage of the real people the film depicted really meeting and that’s touching enough to make it a wavering recommendation.
Score: 78