Lion

Every year there's at least one movie nominated for best picture that I hadn't seen before the nominations came out and this year that movie was LION. To be honest, I wasn't thrilled to see the movie because what little I knew of it was that it was about how a glorious white woman (Nicole Kidman) adopts and Indian kid. I assumed it'd be all about white people saving minorities and while a good movie is a good movie, no matter the subject, I was like, "I'll pass."

But, I like to see all the nominees (unless they're about autistic kids who lose their fathers on 9/11) so I hit the Fox tower to see what's up.

Turns out I had LION all wrong. It was pretty good. The first half of the movie follows a 5-year-old kid (Sunny Pawar) in India who is separated from his brother (Ahishek Bharata), mother (Priyanka Bose) and tiny village when he ends up lost on an empty train and shipped 1500 miles across the country to Benghali, where he doesn't speak the language and ends up a street kid.

One hair raising near tragedy after another besets the kid until he's eventually adopted from an awful orphanage by Australians Nicole Kidman and her husband (David Wenham). Eventually he grows into Dev Patel and decides it's time to find his family and village. But where is it? He has no idea. He was 5, after all. I'll give you one guess whether he finds his village and mother or not. Here's a clue: there wasn't a dry eye in the Fox Tower when the credits, preceded by real footage of the people this film was based on, rolled.

The pleasant surprises this film had in store for me mostly involved the first half of the film featuring young newcomer Sunny Pawar as the lost 5-year-old. He was totally believable, very expressive, and utterly sympathetic. The filmmakers chose to tell the story in a straight-forward, chronological way, and I while I'm not against narratives that jump around, I think that works to this film's credit in one important way: it puts the thrust of the narrative squarely on the shoulders of the central character, and by the time we get to the later scenes in Australia, we are used to seeing things through his eyes and know that this is his story and no one else's.

I guess I was cynical to think this movie would be about canonizing the adoptive parents. We get to see them as normal, imperfect people who just want to do some small good in the world. This isn't about whether or not they can have kids or what magical inspirations they are to their children.

All that said, the movie does suffer from having such an incredible first half followed by a more conventional second half. Most of the second half involves Patel's decidedly un-cinematic search for his village. He mostly just searches Google Earth. I'm sure in real life this was quite a feat, but it doesn't translate well to the screen. The stuff that translates better is a subplot about the struggle with the Australian couple's other adopted kid (Divian Ladwa), also from India, but more troubled than Patel. We get the impression he suffered the abuse and tragedy Patel largely avoided. He's a compelling character, but we get more screen time with Patel's boring girlfriend (Rooney Mara - not her fault the character's boring).

So the movie's uneven but it has it where it counts and if you want to see a based-on-a-true-story bonafide tear jerker, this one's for you.