Lion (2016)

Lion is an incredible true story about a young Indian boy, played by a radiant 6 year-old Sunny Pawar, who gets lost and is eventually adopted and raised by an Australian family. The second half of the film is about the college-aged boy searching for his birth mother via Google Earth. It is a very emotional movie, as you could imagine. There is a lot of soul searching. It is really emotionally devastating--at the beginning, at the end, and in the middle. You cry in the sad parts and in the happy parts. It's unrelenting.

The first half is carried by a 6-year-old. I cannot emphasize enough how good he is. A lot of these scenes are characterized by silent acting, and he shows emotions without words. The cinematography in the Indian scenes is absolutely stunning. The poverty is overwhelming but each shot is just beautiful. There is an underlying theme of child trafficking in the first half of the movie. I don't know if it is detailed in his memoir, but I can't imagine that he would have known so much detail at such a young age. Surely, it is incredible that he fended for himself for so long and I don't doubt that his child's intuition was leaps and bounds beyond what I'm capable of, but I think there was some artistic license there to give the movie a theme and purpose.

Nicole Kidman and Dev Patel, too, give excellent performances. The movie really should've been in the running for a hair styling Oscar. I didn't really need the subplot with Rooney Mara, but it does give Patel's character a little more conflict, as if he needs more conflict in his life. This is kind of a spoiler, but after all the methodical searching, he seems to stumble upon the right spot just by magic. There is a whole process that goes straight out the window, and then just by coincidence it all clicks. It's a little too perfect and implausible of a scene. It is a very crucial scene upon which the movie hinges that fails for me.

And finally, the music is really good too. Sia contributes a song to the end credits. The score by Dustin O'Halloran is enchanting, definitely taking some influence from Indian music but crafting a beautiful soundtrack that is uniquely his own.