At times sentimental, never maudlin
Garth Davis
Dev Patel, Sunny Pawar, Nicole Kindman, Rooney Mara half traces the Dickensian world into which Saroo (Pawar) is thrust after he falls asleep on a long-distance train and wakes up in Calcutta. Stranded in the overcrowded streets of the city and with no way of finding his family, the lost kid is eventually adopted and lives in greater comfort with his surrogate parents (Kidman and David Wenham).
Fast forward 25 years. Now in his thirties, Saroo (Patel) still obsesses over the fate of his birth family. With the aid of Google Earth, he finally identifies the rural Indian village where he spent his childhood. Expectedly the narrative winds down on an audiencefriendly note.
The film loses some of its lustre during the latter half, with the fleeting visions of his beloved older brother and his hard-working mother (Priyanka Bose).
Several subsidiary characters like the adoption agency representative (Deepti Naval), Saroo’s Australian girlfriend (Rooney Mara) and his second adoptive sibling are underutilised. On the other hand, the soundtrack makes judicious use of tunes by Lata Mangeshkar, Salma Agha and AR Rahman. While Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman are reliably efficient, it’s the mesmeric performance by young newcomer Sunny Pawar which lends the film its emotional wallop.
At times sentimental but never maudlin, Lion is an inspiring slice-of-life odyssey.
Of late, M Night ShyamaIan has been dismissed as a has-been auteur, no longer capable of such twisty delights as The Sixth Sense or Signs. The good news is that Split proves that the director can still whip up nail-biting tension despite the limited resources at his disposal. Recalling the work of such masters of the macabre as Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma, Shyamalan devises a a climactic set which see-saws between camp and cool. An uncredited cameo from the star of a couple of his early films indicates possibility of a sequel. A stylish spine-chiller, it marks a welcome return to form for the former wunderkind.