Lion (2016) - Garth Davis

Based on true events, Garth Davis' Lion is a well-crafted crowd-pleaser, a film focused on telling a compelling human interest story about family, love, and perseverance which shows very little interest in tackling the complex socio-political issues facing India and the larger world as we know it.  Opening in 1986, Lion introduces us to Saroo, a five-year-old child living in the rural countryside of India, the middle child in a poor but happy family that is held together by his strong-minded, hard-working mother.  On a trip with his brother to find work, Saroo finds himself separated from his older brother, trapped on a decommissioned passenger train which takes him to Calcutta, leaving the young boy over 1500 miles away from home.  Lost in an alien, urban environment and too young to identify his home to any of the authorities, Saroo survives as a street child until he is eventually sent to an orphanage.  Soon after, Saroo is adopted by a couple in Australia, and Garth Davis' Lion fast-forwards 25 years later, finding a now adult Saroo attending a university in Melbourne.  For all of his good fortune, specifically growing up in a loving and prosperous home, Saroo can't help but shake the thoughts of his lost family, haunted by the uncertainty associated with what has become of them. Plagued by guilt, Saroo sets out on a search to locate his place of birth in India, dead set on finding his lost family, tormented by the questions in his mind about their well-being.  Garth Davis' Lion is a simple, yet effective story of the power of love and family, a film which effectively pronounces the importance of empathy and sacrifice while exhibiting how love is not something which adheres to scarcity, exhibiting how Saroo as a character has always been loved by both his mothers, regardless of the life-alternating circumstances.  In a sense, Lion is a film which laments that family in itself is to a degree nothing more than a social construct, with shared blood being simply a symptom of most families but nothing more significant.  It's through unconditional, selfless love which a family is truly formed, something which Saroo doesn't fully grasp until the end of the film, coming to the realization that he has two families now, both of which love him very much.  For much of the film, guilt drives Saroo to hide his search from his adoptive parents and girlfriend, fearing that they will feel underappreciated by his burning desire to located his birth parents.  Saroo doesn't want to emotionally hurt or disappoint his adoptive parents, unable to grasp that they want nothing more than his own happiness, with Lion as a film beautifully exhibiting the true selfless nature of love.  Saroo is psychologically tortured by the questions and uncertainty of his birth family and his adoptive parents recognize this, understanding that their child needs to find peace of mind when it comes to the fate of his birth mother.  For the most part, Lion avoids commentary on poverty, colonialism, and other socio-political issues,  instead focusing much more on its deconstruction of love through the introspective study of a man who is mentally adrift, lost in a haze of guilt and uncertainty.  While the story itself is rather straight-forward, Garth Davis' direction really impressed me, being far more impressionistic than I was expecting, effectively getting into the psyche of this tortured character, a young man who feels haunted by questions about his past.  The pain and guilt Saroo feels about living a privileged life, while knowing that his own birth mother has no idea he is even alive is the emotional weight of the film, with Garth Davis' use of impressionistic, even surreal techniques effectively getting into the headspace of this character, whose consumed by guilt and unanswered questions about his past.  Emotionally resonant and well-crafted, Garth Davis' Lion is a well-told story of perseverance and love, an undeniably uplifting film that manages to mostly avoid the typical cliches of the genre.

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